Geocaching Puzzle Tools

File Carver & Hex Viewer

Find whole files hidden after the end of an image, and browse the raw bytes.

You can also drag an image here, or press Ctrl+V to paste a screenshot.

Why anything can hide after an image

Every image format says where it ends: a PNG finishes with an IEND chunk, a JPEG with an end-of-image marker. Viewers stop reading there and ignore whatever follows, so a whole second file can be appended and the picture still displays perfectly. Joining a PNG and a ZIP together produces a file that is honestly both.

This page walks the format's own structure rather than searching for the end marker, because those bytes occur naturally inside compressed image data and a naive search finds the wrong one. It then reports anything past that point, and scans the whole file for other formats' signatures in case something is buried in the middle rather than tacked on the end.

If a hidden archive turns up, save it and open it as you would any other file. If the readable text below contains something coordinate-shaped, it gets called out above. That's often the whole puzzle.

  • EXIF & Metadata Reader Read every metadata tag, including GPS coordinates and the embedded thumbnail, which often differs from the picture itself.
  • Bit Plane & LSB Viewer Inspect every bit plane of an image and pull out messages hidden in the least significant bits.
  • Channel & Levels Explorer Split an image into its red, green, blue and alpha channels, stretch the contrast and posterise it to make faint hidden shapes visible.