What's really inside the file
Cropping is supposed to replace a picture with a smaller one. Some phone and desktop editors don't fully do that: they leave an embedded preview that still shows the pre-crop image, or they leave the old picture's bytes sitting after the new file's end marker. This inspector reads those two places and shows whatever can be decoded.
Everything is labelled for what it is — an embedded preview, an extra picture stored after the end, or a strip rebuilt from leftover data — so you can tell a genuine recovery from a best-effort one. When nothing is found, it says so rather than inventing a result.
- Embedded previews — the thumbnail some cameras and editors store inside a JPEG.
- Appended pictures — a whole second image left after the file's real end marker.
- Leftover runs — data after the end marker that can sometimes be partly rebuilt.
It reads, it doesn't guess
This is a reader, not a generator. It never paints or imagines missing content — it only decodes bytes the file actually contains. That's the difference between it and the uncrop tools: those build new edges, this uncovers what was already there.
Questions
Does my photo get uploaded?
No. The picture is read, grown and encoded by code running in this browser tab. It is never sent to a server — there is no server to send it to. The only download that ever happens is the optional edge-painter model, which travels one way, from our model file server to you.
Will it always find the original?
No, and it won't pretend to. Many cropped files carry nothing extra — a properly made crop leaves no trace. It finds something only when the editor that made the file left a preview or leftover data behind.
Which files are worth checking?
Screenshots and quick phone crops are the most likely to carry leftovers, because the editors that make them have historically not always truncated the old file.
Metadata viewer, is that what this is?
It's more than an EXIF viewer. "Image metadata viewer" and "exif viewer" are each around 50K searches a month in India; this reads the embedded preview and the bytes past the file's end as well, which a plain metadata reader ignores.