With that 'breakthrough', the tool can now read the data directly on your computer, thus the data never leaves your computer - making it safe for both me, the author, and you the user.

The documentation provided by Phil Harvey on his website again made this possible. The second version was created in the fall of 2018 and featured a simple EXIF decoding implementation in JavaScript - the 'programming' language that enables most of the fancy stuff on the web.

Using the ExifTool application also meant that the files had to be uploaded on one of my servers, which meant that with time more and more problems were being caused by the tool (not to mention all the hacking attempts). (You can read more about it in this thread about the tool) The first tool used the free and opensource application ExifTool by Phil Harvey (Credit to that person!) to extract the required data from SONY ARW and JPG files. The tool was created in april 2013 when a user called Micholand posted a way to read shutter count information on the A900.

Exif tools online