Photo Metadata Viewer: a small, fast EXIF inspector for macOS
A SwiftUI app that opens any photo or XMP sidecar and shows its EXIF, IPTC, XMP, and other metadata as a foldable, searchable, keyboard-navigable tree.
Working with photos seriously — Lightroom catalogs, RAW files, XMP sidecars, EXIF surgery — means spending a surprising amount of time wanting to see exactly what metadata is in a given file. exiftool does that flawlessly, but it’s a CLI that prints 200 lines of pairs. I wanted a small native window where I could drop a file, search the metadata, copy the field I needed, and close it. Photo Metadata Viewer is that window.
Read-only by design
The app opens, displays, and copies. It never writes. exiftool can edit metadata in place with -overwrite_original and the various corner cases that come with it, and putting a GUI on the destructive side wasn’t the goal — when the same UI handles read and write, “edit by accident” becomes a real failure mode.
Single-window reuse
Opening a new file reuses the existing window rather than spawning a new one. When checking metadata across a folder, the workflow is drop a file, look, drop the next file — accumulating N windows along the way is exactly what I didn’t want.
Keyboard-first navigation
Tab between the search field and the list. Up/down to move rows. Space to fold a group. Left/right to collapse and expand. Enter or Cmd+C to copy as YAML.
Metadata inspection is a power-user task, and the keyboard-first shape keeps it operable without breaking flow. SwiftUI makes this slightly awkward to wire up, but doable.
Was it worth it?
The full source is six files under Sources/ — small, fast, opinionated. It shows metadata for an image and reaches for keyboard shortcuts before pointer interactions wherever the platform allows.
dmorel69/photo-metadata-viewer— Swift, SwiftUI, MIT