Exifedit.com: Photos Exif Editor
Donna, iPhoto should work for most people’s needs on a Mac. It’ll let you do batch changes to the title, description and date/time fields, as well as let you adjust that data for individual photos. You can, of course, also keyword the photos.
I work on a Mac, and I use Adobe Lightroom, which is a professional tool for managing one’s photo library. If you’re a serious photographer or an amateur looking for more control over your photos’ meta data, then you might want to look into it. Apple also makes a similar piece of software called Aperture. I haven’t used it but I hear it’s quite good. Spotlight should search the EXIF data automatically, and so should iPhoto. If I’m not mistaken, some of the more advanced options in Spotlight let you set up custom search filters based on EXIF parameters.
Now, if you want to learn more about EXIF, Google and Wikipedia are always a great place to start. Here’s the EXIF page on Wikipedia:. 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. I use Aperture and I’m a fan of it but I wouldn’t say it’s great for editing EXIF data. It does do a good job with some types of annotations, keywords for example. But an EXIF editor will allow you to add any valid EXIF tag and Aperture does not do this.
For example is no way to add GPSLatitude/GPSLongitude tag values in Aperture (and many others). The app will display these tag values if present in the image files but not add or edit them.
What’s more Aperture seems to have some problems when it comes to dealing with changes in EXIF for photos that are already included as referenced masters. Other apps let you edit metadata using something like ExifTool and then rebuild the image to pull in the new tag values. Aperture seems to choke a little if you try to do this, e.g. I’ve had it complain that my image files are invalid after editing EXIF outside of the app though the files are provably intact. Sooner or later it will recognize the files as valid again w/o picking up the new EXIF data. I can only assume there must be some solution to this problem so I don’t want to scare anyone away from Aperture as a photo management app but an EXIF editor it is not. I would recommend taking a look at ExifTool which is a cross-platform, easily scriptable commandline EXIF editor and a Perl library.
Exifedit.com Photos Exif Editor
Batch processing photos is not a problem and it’s easy to incorporate in your workflow.