By Graham K. Rogers

A few weeks back, in early preparation for the retirement of Aperture on the Mac, I looked at applications for revealing metadata on iOS and OS X. Before I looked at apps on the Mac, I made an examination of apps that would show the same on my iPhone and other iOS devices.

Of the four I installed, I prefer ExifViewer as a standalone app, but that means switching from Photos to the app to check for the metadata. It only takes a few seconds, but this information should be instantly accessible.

When editing a picture one day in Photos on my iPhone 6, I pressed the Export button. There are three sections of actions available, beginning with AirDrop. Below that are specific apps that may be accessed directly from within Photos. At the bottom of the screen are actions available: developers include specific APIs to integrate with parts of iOS. Actions here may include Copy, Print, Assign to Contact and others. More (to the far right) shows a list for more to be added as they become available.

I was not sure how this happened initially but one of the actions was marked, Investigate. Pressing this showed me a version of the image selected with some metadata beneath with a map (if GPS data is available). At the bottom was a large button: View Advanced Metadata. This revealed a panel with several sections, each showing more data than most will need.

With my iPhone 6 in for repair I switched to a 16 GB iPhone 6 Plus that I am using to test photo-capabilities. The Investigate feature was not available so I installed each of the metadata apps until I found the one that gave me the additional control already on the iPhone 6.

This is Photo Investigator: a free app from Daniel Anderson. There are two in-app purchases of $0.99 each: to remove ads and to be able to edit metadata. With the valuable addition to Photos I now have, I paid the full $1.99 (60 baht) as a way to thank the developer. If we don't, all those free apps might eventually dry up.

Graham K. Rogers teaches at the Faculty of Engineering, Mahidol University in Thailand where he is also Assistant Dean. He wrote in the Bangkok Post, Database supplement on IT subjects. For the last seven years of Database he wrote a column on Apple and Macs. He is now continuing that in the Bangkok Post supplement, Life.