Does Google use EXIF data from pictures as a ranking factor?

Today's question comes from Christian in Madrid who asks,

Does Google use EXIF data from pictures as a ranking factor?

The short answer is we did a blog post, and I think April of 2012 where we talked about it, and we did say that we reserve the right to use EXIF or other sort of metadata that we find about an image in order to help people find information, and at least in the version of image search as it existed back then, when you clicked on an image, we would sometimes show the information from excess data in the right hand side bar. So it is something that Google is able to parse out.

And I think we do reserve the right to use it in ranking.

So if you're taking pictures, I would go ahead and embed that sort of information if it's available within your camera, because if somebody wants to eventually search for camera types or focal links or dates or something like that, it can be possibly a useful source of information.

So I'd go ahead and include it.

If it's already there.

I wouldn't worry about adding it if it's not there.

But we do reserve the right to use it as potentially a ranking factor.