Edit a photo's EXIF data

About this tool

Every photo from a camera or a phone carries a block of notes about itself: when it was taken, with what, sometimes where and by whom. Sometimes those notes are wrong or missing. The camera's clock was never set, so every picture is dated years in the past. A scanned print has no date at all. A photographer wants a name and a copyright line in the file before it goes to a client. This page lets you put them right.

Add a JPG and the fields fill with what the file holds now. Change a value to rewrite it, or empty a field to remove it. Only what you change is changed: the exposure settings, the lens data and the maker's own notes stay as they were. The picture is not decoded or compressed again, so there is no loss of quality; the image data in the download is the same, byte for byte, as in the file you added.

A removed or replaced value is overwritten where it stood, not merely unlisted, so it cannot be dug out of that field afterwards. Three things are outside this page's reach. It edits EXIF only, so a file that also carries XMP or IPTC data may repeat the old values there. A camera's maker note, its own block of settings, is kept exactly as it is, and it often names the camera and can hold a serial number or an owner's name. The result note tells you when a photo has any of these. And it works on JPG files only.

What you get

• Date taken, author, copyright, description, camera, software and GPS location
• No re-encoding: the picture is byte for byte the same
• Removed values are wiped from their fields, not just hidden
• Everything you do not touch is kept, maker notes included
• The result is read back and checked before you get it
• Nothing is uploaded

How it works

EXIF data sits in one segment near the start of a JPG, laid out like a small TIFF file: tables of entries, each a tag number, a type and either a short value or the position of a longer one. This page rewrites that segment and copies every other byte of the file through unchanged. Inside the segment nothing is moved. A new or longer value is added at the end and its entry pointed at it; a table that gains an entry is written afresh at the end. Camera makers' private notes often contain positions of their own, which would break if anything shifted, and this way they stay valid.

Whatever is replaced or removed is filled with zeros, including the old table when a new one is written, so the previous author, date or coordinates are not left lying in unused space. Some cameras repeat their name or the date in the list of fields that belongs to the small preview picture, and a copy there is changed along with the main one. When a location is set or removed, the entire GPS block is replaced: an old altitude or timestamp beside new coordinates would be false. A location that is left alone keeps the date and time of its GPS fix, even when the date taken is changed. A maker note is never opened, so a camera name or a serial number inside one stays in the file. Text is stored as UTF-8. Before the file is offered for download it is read back, and it is handed over only if every field holds what was asked for and the picture's orientation is as it was. An EXIF segment can hold 64 KB at most; values that would not fit are refused.