ExifToolGui Comparisons

How the Windows front-end for ExifTool stands against the alternatives — compared on sourced facts about platform, maintenance, licensing and what each tool actually does.

Compared on facts, not feature checklists

Platform, maintenance status, licensing and the pairing requirement decide most real choices — the guides below take them in that order.

Every comparison in this hub starts from the same baseline, so it is worth stating once, clearly. ExifToolGui — the maintained V6 fork by Frank Bijnen, continuing Bogdan Hrastnik’s original — is a Windows-only graphical front-end for Phil Harvey’s ExifTool, licensed under GPL-3.0, currently at V6.3.12. It does not include ExifTool in its portable builds; it drives the separate program. Its strengths are the ones its design states: viewing all the metadata ExifTool recognises, editing the frequently used tags, and doing so in batches across selected files.

The alternatives differ from that baseline in genuinely different ways, which is why a single ‘best tool’ verdict would be dishonest. jExifToolGUI is the cross-platform member of this family — Java-based, running on Windows, Linux and macOS — but its development has stopped. GeoSetter is a capable Windows freeware geotagging tool that itself uses ExifTool for writing, from an old release line. XnView MP is not a dedicated metadata editor at all but a broad cross-platform viewer and converter. Exif Pilot is a Windows editor whose batch work sits behind a paid plug-in. And the command line is always there, with the full power the GUI samples from. Each comparison below uses only facts this site could source for both sides.

The comparison guides below are being published as part of this site’s comparison series; each one is built only from sourced facts about both programs — what they run on, what they cost, and whether they are still maintained.

All comparisons

Choosing, then setting up

If a comparison leaves you choosing ExifToolGui, the download page has the current files and the ExifTool companion they require, and the Tutorials hub turns the choice into a working setup. If it leaves you choosing something else — a Mac user choosing jExifToolGUI, for instance — that is this hub working as intended. The Mac options page collects the cross-platform routes in one place.

One comparison appears in every guide and deserves emphasis here: whatever front-end you pick, ExifTool itself is the constant. GeoSetter writes through it, jExifToolGUI drives it, ExifToolGui is built on it. Learning what the engine does — reading, writing and deleting metadata individually, in groups or altogether — transfers between all of them.

A note on completeness: this hub compares the alternatives this site could source properly. One more name belongs in the landscape even without its own guide — Metadata++, a Windows freeware program by Jean Piquemal for displaying and modifying metadata across photos, videos, music and text files, which takes the opposite distribution choice from ExifToolGui and bundles an exiftool.exe in its install footprint. It is mentioned here so the landscape is honest, and it is not given a comparison page on thinner sourcing than the six above. Where a rival’s facts could not be verified from a primary source in this site’s research — a price, a version, a licence term — the comparisons say what is known and leave the rest blank rather than filling it in.