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Please recommend an EXIF editor for JPG photographs.

Here are the requirements:

  • Must be able to edit the EXIF tags, not just view them
  • Must be freeware ("gratis")
  • Must be compatible with Windows 7 SP1
  • Must have a graphical user interface (cannot be a command-line tool)
  • Must not require installing additional scripting environments like Python.
  • Must not be abandon-ware (must be currently maintained by developer)
  • Must be reliable so that it will not corrupt images

Strongly prefer a recommendation that directly edits the EXIF tags without recompressing the image.

Open-source is a plus, but definitely not a requirement. Portable software is a plus, but also not a requirement.

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The answer to most of your points is the excellent Phil Harvey's ExifTool the only missing point is that it doesn't have a GUI in and of itself. There are, however, a number GUI's that work with ExifTool - personally I recommend pyExifGUI but you will also need to install python.

  • Must be able to edit the EXIF tags, not just view them - Yes
  • Must be freeware ("gratis") - Yes
  • Must be compatible with Windows 7 SP1 - Yes Cross platform
  • Must have a graphical user interface (cannot be a command-line tool) - Yes separately
  • Must not be abandon-ware (must be currently maintained by developer) - Yes Lots of commits in the last year.
  • Must be reliable so that it will not corrupt images - Yes I have not heard of many problems but the tool by default back the original file up as .orig
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  • Thanks Steve. Before posting my question, I went through all the ExifTool GUI front-ends and discovered they all seemed to be abandon-ware. I skipped pyExifGUI due to the requirement to install a whole scripting environment just to use it. I would prefer not to have that bulk (and another thing to maintain). Regardless, I do thank you for posing this possibility. You mentioned that you have not heard of many problems with corrupt images. Was it ExifTool or pyExifGUI that was causing rare corruption? Can you provide links to the problems?
    – Amazon Dies In Darkness ♦
    Commented Dec 7, 2014 at 3:55
  • @RockPaperLizard - Thursday I helped a co-worker install python and some dependencies - it took 20 mins most of which was working around the company security policies which prevented the use of pip python is very space efficient. But in the case of pyExifToolGUI there is an executable which means it is writte in python but you don't have to install python unless you wish to tweak and run from source.
    – Steve Barnes
    Commented Dec 7, 2014 at 8:27
  • Instead of pyExifGUI I recommend ExifTool GUI. The GUI isn't actively developed anymore. But I think this doesn't matter so much because the underlying core program ExifTool IS maintained. It fits all your needs. But I cannot test if a image is re-compressed or not
    – nixda
    Commented Dec 7, 2014 at 17:32
  • @nixda pyExifGUI is actively developed - last release was nearly a year ago but there have been 26 commits since. As far as I can find the only (re-)compression done by exiftool is for compressed metadata.
    – Steve Barnes
    Commented Dec 7, 2014 at 18:41
  • Well, I just wanted to show a portable solution where no phyton installation is needed
    – nixda
    Commented Dec 7, 2014 at 19:03

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