Edit the EXIF data in a photo

How to use it#

1. Drop a JPG, PNG, or WebP onto the Details box, or click it to choose one. Its current date, location, and credits fill the fields.
2. Change the date taken, or paste new coordinates into Location. Leave a field empty to remove it, or press Remove location.
3. Set the author, the copyright notice, and a description if you want them in the file.
4. Download the edited copy once it has been written. Restore original puts every field back as the photo had it.

Fixing the date a photo was taken#

A camera stamps each photo with the time on its own clock, and that clock is often wrong: never set after a battery change, left on home time on holiday, or a year out after a reset. Photo libraries sort by that stamp, so a whole trip can land in the wrong month or in 2019. Changing Date taken rewrites it, along with the digitised time most cameras record beside it, and the photo sorts where it belongs. When a whole trip is out by the same amount, the batch date changer moves every photo at once.

Scanned prints are the other common case. A scanner records the day of the scan, and setting the date the picture was really taken puts old family photos in order. The time zone offset newer phones record is kept as it was, and the date the photo was last modified is left alone.

Moving, adding, or removing the location#

Location takes coordinates the way maps give them. Right-click a place in most map apps and copy its latitude and longitude, such as -33.924661, 18.377356, and paste them in. Degrees, minutes, and seconds work too, written as 33° 55′ 28.8″ S, 18° 22′ 38.5″ E, and View on map checks the spot before you save.

A photo taken without location, or by a camera without GPS, can have one added. That is called geotagging, and it puts the photo on the map in a photo library. Moving a position also removes the altitude, the direction the camera faced, and the time of the GPS fix, since those described the old one. Remove location, or an empty box, takes out every GPS detail.

What else changes when you save#

Many photos repeat the date, the place, and the author in two more places: an XMP block written by editing software, and IPTC captions written by newsroom tools. A program that reads those copies first would go on showing the old details, so once anything is edited they are left out, and the page says so before you download. Windows keeps its own copies of the author and the description, which it shows as Authors and Title, so those are removed and Windows reads the new values instead.

Camera makers also keep a private block of settings called maker notes, and some of them store positions inside it that assume it never moves. Rewriting the EXIF data moves it, which would leave those positions pointing at the wrong bytes, so the maker notes are removed rather than quietly broken. Every other EXIF tag, the picture itself, its colour profile, and its orientation are untouched.

HEIC, WebP, and what metadata can prove#

A browser cannot rewrite a HEIC or an AVIF, so iPhone photos in their default format need converting first with HEIC to JPG. The converted copy carries none of the original details, so note the date and place in the EXIF viewer first and type them back in here. A WebP saved in the basic format has no place for EXIF at all and has to be converted too. JPG, PNG, and WebP files from most cameras and editors can be edited directly.

Because anyone can change these details in seconds, a date or a location in a photo is a claim rather than evidence. That matters in both directions: an edited photo should not be passed off as proof of where someone was, and a photo that seems to be in the wrong place may simply have had its clock or position changed.