How to Edit Photo Metadata on Mac and Windows (2026)

First, what “photo metadata” actually means

Editing metadata is easier once you know there are three different layers, because different tools touch different ones. EXIF is what the camera writes automatically — shutter, aperture, ISO, lens, date and often GPS. IPTC is the descriptive and rights layer people add by hand — caption, keywords, creator, copyright. XMP is Adobe’s modern container that can hold both and travel in a sidecar file. When you “add keywords,” you’re usually writing IPTC/XMP; when you “remove the location,” you’re clearing an EXIF GPS field. Our full metadata glossary has the rest.

Edit photo metadata on Windows

Windows has a built-in editor in File Explorer. Right-click the image, choose Properties, and open the Details tab. Click a value next to a field — Title, Subject, Tags (keywords), Comments, Authors, Rating — type your change, and click OK. A useful tell from Microsoft’s own documentation: if a field shows no editable box, that property simply isn’t writable for this file.

That last point is the catch. Explorer lets you edit the descriptive fields, but the camera’s EXIF — exposure, camera model, usually the capture date — is shown read-only. And write support is format-dependent: it works reliably for JPEG and TIFF, but RAW camera files are effectively read-only in Explorer, and PNG editing only appeared in very recent Windows builds. If Explorer won’t let you change what you need, that’s your cue to use ExifTool or a DAM (below) rather than fight it.

Edit photo metadata on a Mac

macOS gives you two built-in routes. In the Photos app, select one or more images and press Command-I (or click the Info button) to open the Info panel, where you can add a Title, a Caption and Keywords, mark a Favorite, and adjust the capture date via Image → Adjust Date and Time or the location via the Location field. One honest caveat: Photos is a non-destructive library, so these edits live in the Photos library and are applied when you export — they aren’t written back into the original file in place. If you need the change baked into the actual file, export a copy after editing.

Preview is the other option for a single file: open the image, click the Info button to open the Inspector, and use its General and “More Info” tabs to see EXIF, IPTC and, for geotagged shots, a map. Recent macOS versions also expose a way to remove the location from a photo directly in Preview’s inspector — handy before sharing a single image, though the exact label moves between macOS releases.

Bulk editing and power tools

The built-in tools are fine for a file or two. For a whole shoot — or to edit fields the OS won’t — the standard tool is ExifTool, a free, cross-platform command-line utility whose own tagline is “Read, Write and Edit Meta Information.” A few canonical commands:

• Read everything: exiftool photo.jpg
• Set a field: exiftool -Title="Spring campaign" photo.jpg
• Add a keyword (Keywords is a list, so use +=): exiftool -Keywords+=beach photo.jpg
• Do a whole folder: add -r to recurse a directory

By default ExifTool is cautious: it preserves your original by writing a copy named photo.jpg_original, and only overwrites in place if you add -overwrite_original. That safety net is exactly the behaviour you want when scripting changes across thousands of files. When even ExifTool becomes a chore — because you also want to tag against a controlled vocabulary, apply changes to hundreds of images visually, and have the results written losslessly back into the files — that’s the job a DAM does. Our metadata fidelity ranking covers which tools actually write your fields back intact.

How to edit without destroying your originals

Metadata edits are still edits, and there are two ways to keep your masters safe. The first is the XMP sidecar: instead of writing metadata into the file, you store it in a small companion .xmp file that sits alongside the original. This is the standard approach for RAW files — Adobe’s tools deliberately don’t write into a proprietary raw “digital negative,” saving keywords and edits to a sidecar instead — and it’s why Lightroom and most DAMs use sidecars for raw formats. ExifTool can create and read these sidecars too.

The second is simpler: work on copies. Duplicate the file (or use Windows’ “create a copy” option, below) and edit the duplicate, leaving the original byte-for-byte untouched. Embedding metadata into a file is more portable — the data travels with the image — but it does modify that file; a sidecar or a copy keeps a pristine master. For an archive you care about, decide this policy once and apply it consistently.

Removing or stripping metadata for privacy

Sometimes the goal is the opposite: get the data out before a photo leaves your hands — usually the GPS location, but sometimes the whole lot. Each platform has a way:

• Windows: Details tab → Remove Properties and Personal Information. The default creates a scrubbed copy with removable properties zeroed out; or choose “Remove the following properties” to strip selected fields from the file itself. Microsoft’s own note: this clears metadata but does nothing to the visible contents of the image.
• macOS: in Photos, use Image → Location → Hide Location, and turn off Location in the share Options before sending; in Preview, remove the location from the inspector for a single file.
• ExifTool: strip everything with exiftool -all= photo.jpg, or just the GPS with a group-scoped delete of the GPS tags — add -overwrite_original to write in place and -r to sweep a folder.

Two honest caveats. Removing metadata from a copy doesn’t touch the original, so keep track of which file you’re sharing. And many websites strip EXIF on upload anyway — convenient for privacy, but it also means you can’t rely on an upload to keep your metadata, and the platform may still read it server-side first. If your keywords and rights matter, keep the authoritative copy in a system you control.

Sources & references

1. ExifTool — the read/write/edit capabilities and default backup behaviour cited here, official site, accessed July 2026.
2. Apple — View and edit photo information in Photos on Mac — the Info panel, keywords, and date-and-time editing steps, accessed July 2026.
3. Apple — Manage location metadata in Photos — hiding location and sharing without it, accessed July 2026.
4. Microsoft — Remove Properties and Personal Information — the Windows Details-tab editor and metadata-removal dialog, accessed July 2026.
5. IPTC Photo Metadata Standard — the descriptive and rights fields you edit, accessed July 2026.
6. PhotoLib methodology — how we research and test DAM tools. See our methodology.