EditMetadata

Metadata

Every photo carries a record of how it came to be: the camera and lens, the exposure settings, when and where it was shot, and the color pipeline it travelled through. Darkroom's metadata viewer surfaces all of it. With the Extended Metadata rewrite it's faster, more reliable, and far more complete than before — if a detail exists in the file, you can now inspect it. Open any photo or video, then choose Metadata from the ••• action menu; it lives in the same place across iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

Extended Metadata view on iPhone and iPad
A clean summary up top, with expandable sections that reveal the complete EXIF, lens, color, and location data underneath.

A clean summary, with the full picture underneath

The view opens with the details you reach for most — camera, lens, exposure, ISO, focal length, and resolution — so the important context is right there at a glance. Expandable sections below reveal everything else: detailed EXIF fields, extended lens data, color space and profile information, GPS coordinates when present, and any other technical metadata embedded in the asset.

It also loads in two stages so it never makes you wait. The moment you open it, you see whatever is already available locally or cached from iCloud Photos; if there's more to fetch, Darkroom pulls it in quietly in the background and merges it in. Responsiveness first, depth second — which matters most with large libraries or assets stored in iCloud.

What it's good for

For newer photographers, metadata is a way to learn from your own shots — review your best and worst frames side by side and the exposure numbers start to explain why. For more demanding work it's a precision tool: compare lenses between shoots, validate export settings, troubleshoot an unexpected color shift by checking the profile, or simply confirm how an image was captured before building a preset for the set. Paired with the Histogram, it turns guesswork into objective decisions.

Editing metadata

With Darkroom+, you can edit metadata directly from the metadata view — no separate app required. Darkroom covers both kinds of metadata, so you can manage the details that matter most:

  • Capture metadata — the technical record of how an image was made: camera model and brand, lens model and brand, ISO, aperture, and shutter speed.
  • Descriptive metadata — the information that helps you organize and identify your work: title, description, keywords, copyright, location, and capture date.
Metadata Editing is accessible on all devices, from both the library and photo editing views.
Metadata Editing is accessible on all devices, from both the library and photo editing views.

Editing is split into two simple flows. When a value is missing — common with manual lenses, film scans, or images imported from other sources — Darkroom lets you add it directly from the metadata view. When you need to update existing fields, enter the dedicated edit state to change multiple values at once, then tap Apply to write your changes back to the image so they stay consistent across your library and any other apps that read the same data.

When editing RAW metadata, Darkroom saves a new version of the photo to apply the changes — an Apple restriction — but your original is preserved and loaded the next time you open it in Darkroom.

Control what you share

Metadata is also about privacy and attribution at export time. You can include or strip location data and add a copyright field to exported files — keep the full record for your archive, and remove sensitive fields when posting publicly.

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