ExifToolGui Tutorials

Step-by-step guides for the Windows graphical front-end to Phil Harvey’s ExifTool: the maintained V6 fork by Frank Bijnen, continuing the original GUI created by Bogdan Hrastnik.

Start with the pairing, then learn the jobs

The nine tutorials are ordered the way a new user meets the program: install it, launch it correctly, then use it for the date, geotagging, batch and renaming jobs it was built for.

ExifToolGui exists to make one powerful program approachable. ExifTool itself is a platform-independent Perl library plus a command-line application for reading, writing and editing meta information in a wide variety of files — and it has no graphical interface of its own. ExifToolGui is the visual layer: a file list, a Metadata panel with a configurable Workspace, menus for the common jobs, and a map for geotagging. Everything the GUI does, it does by handing the work to ExifTool underneath.

That is why the pairing fact runs through every tutorial on this page: the GUI and ExifTool are two separate downloads. The portable V6 executables do not bundle ExifTool at all; only the V6 installer can fetch it for you during setup. If the pairing is wrong — most often because exiftool(-k).exe was never renamed to exiftool.exe, or the exiftool_files folder was separated from the executable — the tutorials below will not behave as written. Start with the install and first-launch guides, confirm that a test photo’s metadata loads and one small edit saves, and every other guide on this page builds safely on that foundation.

All tutorials

Each guide works on copies first and verifies by reading the file back — the habit that makes batch metadata work safe.

Where to go next

The tutorials teach operating the program. The jobs themselves — removing GPS data before you share a photo, stripping all metadata, fixing the dates on scanned photos, preparing files for a marketplace upload — have their own dedicated hub, because they are the reason most people open this program in the first place: see Metadata Tasks with ExifToolGui. If something goes wrong along the way, the Troubleshooting hub covers the failures these tutorials can surface, starting with the “ExifTool not found” pairing error.

One scope note, stated plainly because it shapes which tutorial applies to you: ExifToolGui is Windows-only software. The V6 documentation says the GUI should run on Windows 7 and 8 (32- and 64-bit) and highly recommends Windows 10 or 11. There is no macOS or Linux build of this GUI — the Platforms & Versions hub explains the real options on those systems instead of pretending otherwise.