OwnerName holds the name of the camera's owner, as opposed to the person who took a given picture. The EXIF specification calls the tag CameraOwnerName (0xA430); ExifTool prints it as OwnerName. It sits in the Exif sub-IFD and arrived with EXIF 2.3 in 2010, in the same batch as BodySerialNumber and the lens tags.
[ExifIFD] 42032 OwnerName : Jane DoeThat line comes from exiftool -G1 -D -OwnerName photo.jpg. The -D option prints tag IDs in decimal, and 42032 is 0xA430.
More than one OwnerName
ExifTool reports several different tags under this one name, depending on what wrote the file:
- 0xA430 in the Exif IFD, the standard tag.
- 0xFDE8, written by Photoshop Camera Raw. ExifTool shows it under the same name and won't write it unless it already exists in the file.
- Tag 0x0009 in Canon MakerNotes, shown as Canon:OwnerName in Canon JPEG and CR2 files.
So a file can show an owner name even when the standard tag is empty. Run exiftool -a -G1 -OwnerName photo.jpg to list every copy with its group; without -a, ExifTool hides duplicates.
Why it matters for privacy
It is a real name, set once in a camera or a utility and then forgotten, and it ends up in every file. On a second-hand body it can be the previous owner's name. On a borrowed one it credits the lender. It ties photos to a person even when Artist is blank, the same way a serial number ties them to one specific camera body.
Reading, editing, clearing
EXIF:OwnerName is in our whitelist. The reader shows it, and the EXIF editor can change or clear it on JPEG and TIFF. MakerNotes copies are outside the whitelist and outside what the editor touches. To remove everything at once, including MakerNotes, see the guide to removing metadata from photos, or run exiftool -all= photo.jpg, which is what our remover does.