How to Edit EXIF Data (And Which Fields Are Safe)
A practical guide to edit EXIF data on Windows, macOS, in the browser or from the command line, plus which fields are safe to change and which ones are not.
You can edit EXIF data with the tools already on your computer, but both Windows and macOS only let you touch a small slice of it. To change the capture date, the GPS coordinates, the creator or the caption properly, you need something that writes the actual EXIF, IPTC and XMP blocks. Nothing you do here touches the pixels.
The short answer
Pick the route that matches the job:
| Situation | Use |
|---|---|
| One file, a couple of text fields | Windows Explorer Properties, or Preview’s Inspector on macOS |
| Wrong camera clock, missing GPS, adding credit | A browser geotagger that writes EXIF, IPTC and XMP together |
| Hundreds of files, scripted rules | The exiftool command line |
| You only want to look, not change | An EXIF viewer |
| You want the data gone entirely | A metadata remover |
Where EXIF actually sits in the file
A JPEG is a chain of segments. The pixels live in one of them. EXIF sits in a separate APP1 segment near the front of the file, IPTC in another marker block, and XMP in an XML packet of its own. TIFF, PNG and WebP each have their own container for the same idea.
That separation is why editing metadata is safe. Rewriting the EXIF block does not re-encode the image, so you do not lose a generation of JPEG quality every time you fix a timestamp. For how the three standards divide the work, see photo metadata explained.
Which fields people actually want to change
Four reasons cover almost every request to change EXIF data.
The camera clock was wrong. You forgot to change the time zone, or the battery died
and the body reset to 2016. Every photo from that trip now sorts incorrectly in Lightroom,
Photos and Google Photos, because all of them sort on DateTimeOriginal.
There is no GPS. Most cameras that are not phones have no GPS receiver at all. The field is absent, and mapping software has nothing to plot. See what geotagging is for what the coordinates look like once they are in there.
Credit is missing. For files going to a client, a stock library or a newspaper,
Artist and Copyright in EXIF plus the IPTC creator fields are what their ingest system
reads.
The caption is empty. ImageDescription and the IPTC caption feed the alt text and
photo credits in most CMS platforms.
A field reference
These are the ones worth editing, with the ExifTool tag name you would use.
| Field | ExifTool tag | What changing it affects |
|---|---|---|
| Capture date | DateTimeOriginal |
Sort order and date filters in every photo app |
| Digitised date | CreateDate |
Some apps prefer this one, so set both |
| File modify date | ModifyDate |
Cosmetic in most tools, ignored by others |
| Latitude / longitude | GPSLatitude, GPSLongitude |
Whether the photo appears on a map |
| GPS reference | GPSLatitudeRef, GPSLongitudeRef |
N/S and E/W. Wrong ref puts you in the wrong hemisphere |
| Altitude | GPSAltitude |
Elevation readouts, rarely used |
| Creator | Artist, XMP:Creator, IPTC:By-line |
Photo credit lines in CMS and stock ingest |
| Copyright | Copyright, IPTC:CopyrightNotice |
Rights statement shown by viewers |
| Caption | ImageDescription, IPTC:Caption-Abstract |
Alt text and captions on import |
| Keywords | IPTC:Keywords, XMP:Subject |
Search inside asset managers |
| Place names | IPTC:City, State, Country |
Human readable location, separate from GPS |
| Orientation | Orientation |
Which way the image displays, no pixels moved |
Leave the rest alone. Exposure values, lens data and the maker notes describe what the camera did, and rewriting them makes the file lie about itself for no benefit.
Editing EXIF data on Windows
Windows Explorer has a metadata editor built in, and it is more limited than most people expect.
- Right click the photo and choose Properties.
- Open the Details tab.
- Click the value next to a field. Editable ones turn into a text box.
- Type the new value and click OK.
You can change Title, Subject, Tags, Comments, Authors, Copyright and the Date taken. That last one is genuinely useful for a wrong clock. What you cannot do is set GPS coordinates. Latitude and longitude appear as read only, so if they are empty, Explorer gives you no way to fill them. The Remove Properties and Personal Information link at the bottom of that tab strips rather than edits, and works on a copy by default.
Editing EXIF data on macOS
Two places, both partial.
In Photos, select an image and press Command + I to open the Info window. You can type a title, a caption and keywords, and you can assign a location by typing a place name into the location field. To fix a date, use Image > Adjust Date and Time, which also offers a time zone. This works, but Photos keeps the change inside its library. The original file on disk is untouched until you export, and only File > Export > Export Unmodified Original or an export with location and metadata included carries the edit out.
In Preview, open Tools > Show Inspector, then the (i) tab. You get a full EXIF readout including a GPS map when coordinates exist. It is a viewer. There is no editable field there beyond the annotation layer.
Editing EXIF data in the browser
Our geotagger runs a WebAssembly build of ExifTool inside the page. You drop files in, set the values, and download the rewritten copies. In one pass it writes:
- GPS latitude, longitude and altitude
- Title and description
- Keywords
- Creator and copyright
- City, state and country as text
- Capture date and time
Each of those goes into EXIF, IPTC and XMP where the field exists in all three, which matters because different software reads different blocks. Adobe Bridge reads XMP first. Older newsroom systems read IPTC. Windows reads a mix.
Nothing is uploaded. The file is read, patched and handed back in your own tab. If you would rather not take that on trust, open DevTools and watch the Network tab while you process a photo, or go offline and notice the tool keeps working. Start at tools.geotaggingimage.com/geotag. No account, no watermark. The free tier caps you at 5 files per batch and a daily operation limit. Pro raises the batch to 50 and drops the cap.
Formats: JPG, PNG, WebP and TIFF can be written. HEIC can be read but not written, because inserting new metadata would mean re-encoding the image to JPEG, and that is a decision we would rather you made yourself with the HEIC to JPG converter first.
PDFs carry their own metadata dictionary, which is a different animal. That lives in PDF metadata.
Bulk edits with exiftool
For a folder of a few hundred files, the command line is faster than any interface.
Shift every timestamp forward by two hours:
exiftool "-AllDates+=0:0:0 2:0:0" /path/to/photosSet coordinates on a whole folder:
exiftool -GPSLatitude=51.5074 -GPSLatitudeRef=N \
-GPSLongitude=-0.1278 -GPSLongitudeRef=W /path/to/photosStamp credit onto everything:
exiftool -Artist="Jane Doe" -Copyright="(c) 2026 Jane Doe" /path/to/photosExifTool writes a .jpg_original backup next to each file unless you pass
-overwrite_original. Keep the backups the first few times.
What editing metadata does not do
It does not change the pixels. A photo tagged with coordinates in Rome is still a photo of your kitchen, and anyone looking at the image can tell. Metadata is a claim about the file, not evidence.
Some fields are effectively off limits. Camera serial numbers, shutter counts and the maker notes block are vendor specific binary, written by Canon, Nikon and Sony in undocumented layouts that vary by firmware version. ExifTool can usually read them and sometimes write them, but a bad write can leave the block unparseable.
And on SEO: geotagging a photo does not improve Google rankings. Google strips EXIF from Business Profile uploads, has said location metadata is not a ranking factor, and a controlled test found no measurable effect. Geotag photos because you want to know where they were taken, not because you expect traffic.
Before you overwrite anything
- Work on copies until you trust the result.
- Set
DateTimeOriginalandCreateDatetogether. Apps disagree about which one wins. - Check
GPSLatitudeRefandGPSLongitudeRef. A missing S or W flips you across the equator or the prime meridian. - Confirm the result in an EXIF viewer rather than trusting the editor that just wrote it.
- If the goal was privacy rather than accuracy, editing is the wrong verb. Use remove GPS metadata instead.