What Is Software?

The Software field names the program that produced the file. Depending on the file it may be the application that created the content, the one that last saved it, or the operating system the file came out of - and it very often includes a version number.

Which files carry it and who writes it

Almost every file type has somewhere to record this, and the row appears under slightly different names in different formats: Software in the exif data of photos, Creator Tool in XMP metadata, Creator and Producer in PDF documents, Application in office documents, an encoder field in audio and video files, and a generator entry in many e-books.

No person types this in. The program writes it about itself when it saves. That has one consequence worth knowing: each program that re-saves the file can overwrite the entry, so the value names the last tool in the chain, not necessarily the one that made the file in the first place. A photo taken on a phone and then cropped on a laptop usually reports the editor, not the phone.

What the value looks like

It is free text, so the exact wording is up to the program:

• GIMP 2.8.22 - the name of the image editor plus its version
• Adobe Photoshop CS6 (Windows) - name, version and the operating system it ran on
• Ver.1.00 - a camera writing only its firmware version
• 16.5.1 - a bare version number, typical of phones, where the camera is part of the operating system, so this field ends up holding the system version

Do not confuse it with a separate Software Version row, which some formats use to hold the version on its own. Here the version, when present, is bundled into the same string as the name.

Why it matters

For anyone checking where a file came from, this is one of the most informative rows in the whole report. It shows that a photograph has been through an editor at all. It tells an archive which application produced a document, which matters when a file will not open properly years later and you need something able to read it. And it is the first place to look when a file renders oddly in one program but not another, because the tool that wrote it is often the explanation.

This is also a field with a real privacy cost, so it is worth thinking about before you publish a file. It tells everyone who receives it which programs you use and which version you are running, and that is more revealing than it sounds. An unusual combination of applications and versions is a recognisable fingerprint: the same value appearing across many files links them to the same person or the same workstation, even when the files are otherwise anonymous. It can also disclose an outdated, unpatched version of a program, or software you would rather not advertise having installed. If you are cleaning a file up before sending it out, clear this row along with the rest.