Everyday
Edit metadata
Pick the file up in Finder, hold ⌥, and let go toward Edit Metadata. A panel opens showing what the file already says about itself.
Works on images, PDFs, audio and video.
It edits the file
Not a copy. Every other thing Arazio does writes a new file and leaves the original alone, which is right for a conversion — a JPG made from a HEIC is a second file, and the first one still has its uses.
Changing a title is not that. Nobody wants two copies of a document that differ only in who it says wrote it. So the edit goes back into the file you dragged, keeping its name, its permissions and its creation date.
What you can change
| Field | Where it shows up |
|---|---|
| Title | Document properties, music players, video libraries |
| Author / Artist | Finder's Get Info, the Author column, music players |
| Description / Comment | Spotlight, photo libraries, player notes |
| Copyright | Document properties; worth setting before publishing |
| Keywords / Genre | Spotlight search, music and video libraries |
| Date | Photo libraries' timelines, sorting by date taken |
| Album, Track | Audio only — how a player groups and orders songs |
Fields a format cannot hold are not shown. A PDF has no album; a photograph has no track number.
Removing a location from a photo
A photo taken on a phone usually records the exact spot it was taken, often to within a few metres. It is the single most surprising thing in a file somebody is about to put on the internet.
When a picture carries one, the panel says so and offers a switch to remove it. Everything else about the photo stays.
Editing a photo does not re-encode it
The picture is copied across untouched and only its tags are replaced. A JPEG is lossy, so re-encoding it to change a caption would cost a generation of quality for a line of text. Arazio does not do that.
The honest limits
Audio and video rewrite their container. The sound and the picture are copied, never re-encoded, so nothing is lost — but the file is rewritten rather than patched in place, which takes a moment on a long video.
Some PDFs carry two copies of their metadata. A PDF can hold an XMP packet as well as the ordinary information dictionary, and a few readers prefer the XMP one. Arazio writes the dictionary. If a change seems not to take in one particular app, that is why.
Stripping is a different tool. Strip Metadata removes everything rather than changing it, and it writes a copy — because it destroys information, and the spare file is worth having.