The main reason I’m writing all of this is that ExifTool is not all that beginner-friendly, and not just because it doesn’t have a GUI (it’s command line only). But before we get on to ExifTool, let’s look at- Alternatives to ExifTool You can’t pick and choose all of the things you might want to keep or clear. Many photo editors, including Lightroom and Photoshop, have limited ability to do this. In the beginning this piece might have sounded like a warning about privacy (which it is, in part), but my real interest in it, and the reason I came to ExifTool, is because I wanted to preserve metadata. More photography-oriented sites like Flickr, 500px and DeviantArt will display any camera setting info that the file contains: I find this very satisfying. In social media, metadata use varies by platform: sites like Facebook and Reddit will strip metadata from images when you upload them. Some metadata is also important for displaying the picture properly. When sending a picture out into the world, I like to make sure that there’s no private info on it, but I also like to have my name on it somewhere. Upload a picture to pixelpeeper.io to see if there are any Lightroom edits in its metadata.

Aside from basic name/copyright/date/camera model, it also records editing info from programs like Lightroom and darktable. XMP is an Adobe format (no longer proprietary) that can store all sorts of stuff. IPTC is much more limited and stores only date/time, creator, copyright and descriptions that you might add like title, keywords and caption. Copyright and author info are often there too. EXIF is where the interesting info is stored, like camera settings, capture time, location and colour space. Types of metadataĮXIF, IPTC and XMP are the 3 metadata formats you will commonly find in an image, with EXIF being the most familiar to photographers. Here are some examples of what an image file can hold: Google likes to keep every bit of info. Image metadata can contain info about the time and location a picture was taken, the camera settings that were used, the camera itself (make, model, serial numbers), how it was edited, the copyright and author, and many other things. If you make and share pictures, even just snaps you make with your phone, it’s good to have a little knowledge about what’s actually in those picture files. Why would I want to use ExifTool in the first place?ĮxifTool is a program that edits metadata on images. This intro is about why you would want to use ExifTool in the first place. For the instructions straight up, skip to the section ‘Actually Using ExifTool’.

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