Where and when, from one photo

Sunrise on Mount Kinabalu in Sabah, Malaysia, taken on our own phone with location on. Here is the photo, and what the file records about it.

• Before: the photo you see.
• After: what the file records.

What it gave away

• Where. GPS coordinates, turned into an address in Kundasang, the town below the mountain, and a pin on a map. Read a pin as "near here": phone GPS is often accurate only to tens or hundreds of metres.
• When. 6:04:12 am on 26 April 2026, recorded by the camera itself.
• Which part of the world. The phone also wrote its time-zone offset, +08:00, before you even look at the map.

What the report said: location exposed, with the address, the map and the capture time.

Go deeper

• Read it from any photo: How to see where and when a photo was taken
• What survives when someone sends you a photo: Can you get metadata from a photo someone sent you?, by Kenneth Springer
• Try it on your own photo