Edit Artist, Copyright and Keywords in ExifToolGui

Descriptive metadata is how a photo carries its author, its rights and its subjects with it. The three workhorses are Artist (who made it), Copyright (the rights statement) and Keywords (what it shows). ExifToolGui edits all of them through its Workspace: in V6.3.12, maintained by Frank Bijnen as a fork of Bogdan Hrastnik’s GUI for Phil Harvey’s ExifTool, the Workspace is the editing surface, and users define which tags are shown and edited there.

This guide covers setting the three tag groups on single files and on batches, reusing values across a folder, and verifying what was actually stored. It pairs naturally with batch-editing a whole folder and Workspaces explained, all in the Tutorials hub. The program is on the download page.

Find or Add the Tags in Your Workspace

Select a photo and look for Artist, Copyright and the keyword fields in the Workspace panel. These descriptive tags appear in the default workspace examples described in the GUI’s documentation, where Artist is a standard shown tag. If a field you need is missing, the Workspace manager is where tag sets are defined: add the tag to the definition once, and it stays available for every later session.

V6 field definitions accept several tag forms, noted in the V6.3.12 release: G0:G1:Tag, G1:Tag, G0:Tag or a bare Tag name. In plain terms, you can address a tag generally or specify its metadata group when the same name exists in more than one group, which matters for descriptive fields that live in EXIF, IPTC and XMP in parallel.

Write Artist and Copyright Once, Correctly

Type the Artist value as the name you want credited everywhere the file travels, and the Copyright value as a complete rights statement, for example the copyright symbol, year and name in the form you use professionally. Consistency matters more than cleverness: the same string across your whole archive makes credit searches and rights checks reliable.

The original GUI manual documents a handy reuse pattern through ExifTool direct: copying one stored tag into another, shown there as -Exif:Copyright

• One consistent Artist string across the archive.
• Copyright as a complete rights statement.
• Artist and Copyright kept in agreement.

Add Keywords That Describe, Not Decorate

Keywords pay off when they describe what a future search would ask: the place, the subject, the event, the people where appropriate. Add them in the Workspace’s keyword field for the selected file, using a small, repeatable vocabulary rather than inventing synonyms per photo. The same word for the same subject across years is what makes a keyword archive searchable.

For a folder from one event, most keywords are shared: select the whole set, apply the shared terms in one batch save, then open individual standout photos and add their specific terms. That two-layer approach, uniform base plus per-photo specifics, keeps batch speed without flattening every photo’s description into the same generic set.

Save to the Selection and Verify Storage

Saving in the Workspace writes the entered values to all selected files through ExifTool. As with every write in this program, verify by re-reading: click to another file and back, and confirm the stored Artist, Copyright and Keywords are what you intended, on the first and last files of a batch at minimum.

These three tag groups are exactly what stock and marketplace pipelines read, so the same verification habit carries into preparing photo metadata for marketplaces. They are also the tags worth keeping when you clean a sharing copy: strip location, keep credit, as strip metadata before sharing explains.

Build a Small Keyword Vocabulary and Keep It

The difference between a searchable archive and a pile of tags is a controlled vocabulary: a short written list of the keyword forms you use, singular or plural settled, place names spelled one way, people’s names in one format. Keep the list with your workspace exports. When a new subject appears, add its term to the list first, then to the photos, so next year’s shoot uses the same word this year’s did.

Review the vocabulary when you prepare marketplace sets, because buyer language and archive language genuinely differ in the words, the spelling conventions and even the level of detail a searcher expects to find. Your archive may file a shoot under a family surname where a marketplace buyer searches for an activity or a concept. The Workspace makes adding the commercial terms to the upload copies a short batch job, and your masters keep the archival vocabulary untouched, each set of terms serving its own audience.

Frequently Asked Questions

Where do I edit Artist and Copyright in the GUI?
In the Workspace. It is the editing surface of ExifToolGui: the Workspace manager defines which tags are shown, and values are edited inline and saved to the selected files.

Can I apply the same credit to a whole folder?
Yes. Select the folder’s files and save the Artist and Copyright values once; the GUI writes them to every selected file in the batch.

Do keywords belong in one group only?
Descriptive tags can exist across EXIF, IPTC and XMP. Workspace field definitions can address a specific group using the G0:G1:Tag style forms when that precision is needed.

Credit, rights and subjects, written once and written consistently, travel with the file forever. For the panel-building side of this workflow, continue with ExifToolGui Workspaces explained in the Tutorials hub.