A Photoshop document (.psd or .psb) is a working file, and it remembers far more than the flattened image it exports. Layers switched off at save time are still fully inside it, the type layers keep their text even after being renamed, and a running list of every document you placed or pasted from is never cleared. Any photo you dropped in also keeps its original camera GPS and serial number, none of which the Photoshop interface shows.
Scan a Photoshop fileThe layers are the headline. A layer switched off when the file was saved appears in no export, yet its name and its content are both fully present, and anyone with Photoshop can switch it back on. Layers get hidden precisely to hold earlier drafts, alternative wording, unredacted originals or notes never meant to ship. A type layer stores its text in full in a separate block, so the complete wording survives even after you rename the layer to something innocuous, and a layer that is hidden only because its enclosing group is switched off still shows its own eye icon as on, which makes it easy to miss.
Photoshop keeps a provenance trail across the life of the file. It appends an entry to the document-ancestors list every time content is placed or pasted in from another document, and it never prunes that list, so on agency work it can name other clients' files long after that content was deleted. The XMP edit history logs each save with a timestamp and the software that made it, which reconstructs a working session down to the hour, and the software-agent list fingerprints every application and often the operating system that has touched the file.
Opening a JPEG and saving it as a PSD keeps the source photograph's EXIF intact. That means the original camera make and model, the body serial and lens serial that are unique to one physical camera, the artist name, and the exact GPS coordinates all survive into the Photoshop file, where nothing in the interface displays them. The IPTC record adds the photographer's by-line, job title and contact email or phone, and the city or sub-location of the shot.
The file also leaks details of the machine and project it was made on. The auto-save path exposes the author's account username (C:\Users\name or /Users/name) and folder layout. Slice names become the filenames and paths of the exported assets, so they reveal the structure of the site or product it was made for. A flattened preview is stored at save time and shows the document exactly as it looked then, including anything later edited out but still on a layer.
This is a selection. The full field manual documents the fields read from each format.
Yes. A layer switched off at save time appears in no flattened export, but its name and its content are both fully present in the file, and anyone opening it in Photoshop can switch it back on. Layers are hidden precisely to hold earlier drafts, alternative wording, unredacted originals or notes that were never meant to ship.
It can. Photoshop appends an entry to its document-ancestors list every time content is placed or pasted in from another document, and never prunes the list. On agency work that means it can name unrelated files that happened to be open, including other clients' documents, long after the pasted content itself was deleted.
Yes. Opening a JPEG and saving it as a PSD keeps the source photograph's EXIF intact, so the camera make and model, the body and lens serial numbers, the artist name and the exact GPS coordinates all survive into the Photoshop file, where nothing in the interface displays them.
The Photoshop interface does not surface the image-resource blocks, the XMP edit history or the carried-over EXIF; it shows you the canvas and the layers panel. The hidden layers, document ancestors, source-photo GPS, slice names and auto-save path all live in structures the UI never lists. This scanner reads those blocks directly.
File X-Ray inspects PSD and PSB but does not produce a cleaned copy, because a browser cannot re-encode Photoshop's layered format. To reduce exposure, delete the hidden layers, clear File > File Info, then flatten and export to JPEG or PNG (formats File X-Ray can strip) and scan the export again to confirm.
File X-Ray reads Photoshop files entirely in your browser - the file never leaves your device. For this format you can also download a clean copy with the metadata removed. Scan a file now.