ExiFox goes direct, and stays free

ExiFox now ships direct from skulkworks.dev too, and unlike the others there's no pricing paragraph in this post. It's still completely free, with nothing to unlock and no in-app purchases, exactly as it was on the Mac App Store.

If you don't know it: ExiFox reads every EXIF, IPTC, XMP and GPS tag your photos and videos carry, then lets you edit, strip or reapply them, in one file or across a batch. It runs locally with a bundled copy of ExifTool.

That last part is why it moved. Inside the App Store sandbox, ExifTool couldn't rewrite a file in place without you re-granting access to its folder every session. For an app whose entire job is editing metadata on files you already have, that got old fast. Outside the sandbox it edits them in place, quietly, the way it always should have.

One fix in this week's releases deserves calling out, because it was quietly telling you the wrong thing. ExiFox reported writes that ExifTool had silently refused as successes. Applying a preset could announce it had been applied to a file that was never touched, which showed up most on raw files, where a tag that works fine on a JPEG may not be writable at all. It now confirms the file really was written and tells you which fields were rejected. Applying a preset across several files also no longer stops at the first one that fails: the rest are processed, and the failures are listed together at the end.

Also new since going direct: an app icon matching the site, settings gathered into one window with Metadata, Our Apps and About as tabs, and a manual update check on the About tab. Version 1.0 is still on the App Store, but development has moved here. It runs on macOS 14 Sonoma or later. Get it from the ExiFox page or with Homebrew: brew install --cask skulkworks/tap/exifox. Release notes live in the changelog.