This is something that I find truly annoying. Why am I interested in EXIF data editors? Because I manage my photos in iPhoto, which does not edit EXIF data by itself. You can edit each photo individually, but it’s anyone’s guess as to whether that info gets written to the original photo itself, or to a cached iPhoto copy. What you do is add it to the Dock, then drag photos from iPhoto onto it to display that photo’s info. It also doesn’t do batch editing of photos. It’s free, and it’s meant to be mainly an EXIF data viewer, with “limited editing capabilities”. The fourth piece of software is Reveal, made for the Mac. Still, $19.99 is a reasonable price to pay given the functionality of the software, and if it indeed delivers on the promise of batch EXIF data editing, then it’s well worth it.

It will, however, let you edit the EXIF data of individual photos, so that’s something to keep in mind. While it’s got a cleaner interface than Exifer, it won’t let you edit photos in batch-mode until you pay up. The third piece of software is called EXIF Pilot, and it’s shareware ($19.99). It also does batch-editing of photos, so I highly recommend you give it a try. For those of you unfamiliar with the concept, yes, this means it’s free. It’s a cool concept that used to be popular in the 90’s and now it’s sort of retro-cool. It’s “postcardware”, which means you’ll “need” to send a postcard to the author if you like the software. It’s coded by a single person, Friedemann Schmidt, and it comes recommended by LifeHacker as well. I think they should price the Standard version at $19.99, and the Professional version at $39.99. I wouldn’t recommend PowerEXIF at their current prices. At that price, I might as well add another $100 and spring for Aperture, where I get a professional photo management application that not only edits EXIF data but allows me to work with my images in pretty wonderful ways.

No, I’d have to get their Professional version, at $89.99, in order to do batch EXIF editing.

Well, the Standard version of PowerEXIF doesn’t do this, even at $49.99, which is a fairly high price for the application’s limited scope. I have thousands of photos I’ve got to edit, and being able to select entire sets and change the date and other info directly would be a huge help. What I’m most interested in at this point is being able to batch edit the EXIF data in my photos. Everyone seems to say it’s a really powerful editor, but I find it overpriced given its features. The first one, recommended by people in various forums, is PowerEXIF Editor, made by a company called Opanda. I’ve been doing a bit of research about the ability to edit a photo’s EXIF data, and I came across four pieces of software, three of them for the PC and one for the Mac.

Exif pilot batch editting