Along with the image per se, digital cameras include a lot of useful information about how it was taken. This information is included in the EXIF header of JPEG and a few other file formats. However, neither Firefox nor Thunderbird show this information when you right click an image to see its properties.

EXIF Viewer, a Firefox and Thunderbird extension developed by Alan Raskin, adds an item to images’ context menu to see the complete EXIF information. It includes details on the camera maker and model, resolution, focusing, camera orientation, editting and a very long list of others. It can also provide details for local digital pictures in your computer. Just load it from the Tools menu and browse for a file.

There is room for improvement of course, like making the context menu smarter so EXIF Viewer is only displayed for JPEG files and not all images. Plus it could look a little better without the menu bar which could be replaced with buttons and checkboxes and perhaps integrate it with the Image Properties dialog window.

Get this extension and browse around some photo web site like Flickr and to get some interesting facts.