MetaLens Autor: Görkem Güler

MetaLens is a browser extension designed to inspect and analyze metadata directly while browsing the web. It automatically detects supported images, PDFs, Office documents, videos, and audio files you open and presents their metadata in an easy-to-read interface without requiring you to manually download and inspect each file with separate tools.

It is particularly useful for OSINT, CTI, digital investigations, privacy research, and security analysis, where publicly accessible files can unintentionally expose information about their creators, organizations, devices, or locations.

MetaLens can identify potentially sensitive information such as EXIF GPS coordinates, author and company names, usernames, device and camera details, software information, timestamps, camera serial numbers, and embedded metadata. For supported video formats, it can also detect location information stored by devices such as iPhones and Android phones.

Beyond conventional metadata inspection, MetaLens includes several security-focused analysis capabilities. It can flag potentially suspicious or sensitive structures such as JavaScript embedded in PDF files, PDF attachments and launch actions, Office macros, remote template references, UNC paths that may expose NTLM authentication, scripts inside SVG files, and additional data appended after the expected end of a file.

Its Page Scan capability extends the analysis beyond individual files. MetaLens can inspect supported images, documents, and media resources found across an entire webpage, evaluate detected metadata and indicators, and organize the results according to their potential risk. Scan results can also be exported as CSV for further investigation or analysis.

For deeper investigations, MetaLens can inspect EXIF data embedded inside PDFs and Office documents, PDF attachments, and supported encrypted PDF structures, including passwordless RC4, AES-128, and AES-256 encrypted files.

MetaLens is also designed to minimize unnecessary network traffic when analyzing large media files. Where supported, it uses HTTP Range requests to retrieve only the portions of a file required for metadata analysis. This means that inspecting metadata from a large video does not necessarily require downloading the entire file.

Analysis results can be exported as JSON for structured processing or as a self-contained HTML report that can be opened independently in a browser.

The extension provides an integrated live analysis panel for supported image, PDF, video, and audio tabs, together with a color-coded toolbar badge that makes potentially interesting metadata or security indicators easier to notice while browsing.

MetaLens supports both English and Turkish, automatically following the browser language while also allowing the language to be changed manually from the extension popup.

In short, MetaLens turns the browser into a lightweight metadata and file-inspection environment, allowing researchers and security professionals to quickly identify location data, identity information, device details, document authorship, hidden metadata, embedded content, and potentially sensitive file structures directly from the web.