A Mac app that adds keywords to hundreds of photos at once

A photo library without keywords is a pile: findable only by date and by memory. With them, a search for heron or 2019 site visit or client approved turns up every frame in seconds — provided the keywords were written into the files, and provided writing them did not mean opening six hundred photos one at a time. Most people never get past that second condition, and the ones who do usually typed the tags into one app’s catalogue, where they are invisible to every other app and lost the day the catalogue is.

Archyv is a Mac app whose Metadata Editor writes keywords into the files themselves. Type the list or paste it, apply it across every selected photo in one pass, or tune it photo by photo, and the result is written through ExifTool where any app that reads standard metadata can find it. Below: why the file is the right home for a keyword, tagging a batch, tuning individual photos, where the keywords end up, and checking the result — and, at the end, where Finder, Photos and Preview stop if you would rather not install anything.

Put the keywords in the file, not in an app

A keyword stored in a catalogue belongs to the catalogue. Move the photos to another drive, hand them to a colleague, switch apps in five years, and the tags stay behind. A keyword written into the file’s own metadata goes wherever the file goes and is readable by whatever opens it next.

That is what the Metadata Editor does. Every change is written through the bundled ExifTool — the engine most metadata software relies on — and afterwards Metadata Review shows the keywords sitting in the file, under the IPTC tab alongside the caption and copyright. Nothing is kept in a database of Archyv’s own that the file would have to be reunited with later.

Tag a whole batch with the same keywords

Select the photos in the Folder Navigator — a trip, a shoot, a client’s folder — and choose Metadata Editor from the process bar; the editor opens automatically. Set the Mode control at the top to Batch, so that the fields you fill in apply across every selected file.

Select the General category to filter the field list, then choose Keywords from the dropdown. The action is explicit: Add puts the new keywords alongside whatever a file already carries, Replace overwrites them, Clear removes them — and the panel shows how many of the selected files currently have a value before you commit to any of the three. It is a multi-value field with a chip-based editor: type a keyword and add it, then the next, or paste a comma-separated list — heron, estuary, Sooke, 2026 — and the chips appear in one go. Click Apply to commit the field. Add any other field that the whole batch shares in the same way — a caption, a location, a rights statement — each in its own category.

Click Start to write the changes. The log shows the validation results and each file’s write status, and a summary at the end lists the successful updates and any errors. Six hundred files with the same six keywords is one Apply and one Start.

Tune the tags photo by photo

Not every keyword belongs on every frame. For the ones that vary — the species in this shot, the person in that one — switch the Mode control to Individual. You now edit one file at a time, choosing the fields you want and moving through the selection with Previous and Next, applying each field’s value as you go, and Start writes the lot at the end.

The practical pattern is both in turn: a Batch pass for the keywords the whole set shares, then an Individual pass for the ones that differ. Each value is validated as you type, and the same chip editor and comma-separated paste work in both modes.

For wildlife photos, Archyv has a dedicated process for tagging by species rather than by hand — the wildlife-by-species guide covers it.

Where the keywords end up

For images, Metadata Review shows the keywords under the IPTC tab — the tab that holds descriptive metadata such as keywords, caption and copyright — and on the Quick View tab, where Keywords sits beside Photographer and Capture Date as one of the combined fields read from the best available source. For videos, keywords are read from every source they may appear in, XMP and QuickTime included.

The editor supports images including JPEG, TIFF, PNG, HEIC and RAW formats such as CR3, and video in MP4, MOV and M4V. For RAW files, where the metadata is saved depends on the format: DNG saves changes directly into the file, and the other RAW formats save them to a companion sidecar file kept alongside the original — which is what a RAW workflow expects, and what the RAW + JPEG guide explains.

Check it before and after

Before a large batch, turn on Simulation Mode in General Settings: the process reports its results in the log without changing your files, so you can read which files would be written before they are. The automatic backup setting — Create backup before metadata modifications — copies each file before it is changed. Cloud files must be downloaded and accessible before editing.

Afterwards, select the files and open Metadata Review, a read-only window that never modifies a file. Keywords is one of the combined fields Quick View can show — which fields appear is set in Settings > Metadata Review — so a tagging pass can be checked file by file with the arrow keys.

Where Finder, Photos and Preview stop

If you would rather try the built-in tools first, here is what each one covers.

Finder’s tags are the quickest thing to apply and the easiest to lose. A Finder tag is an attribute macOS keeps beside the file, not metadata inside it: it shows up in Finder and Spotlight on your Mac, and does not survive an upload, an email attachment or a move to a non-Mac system. For sorting your own desktop it is fine; as a keyword on a photo it is not there.

Apple Photos applies keywords to a selection through its Keyword Manager, and inside its library that works well. The keywords live in the library database, reach a file only on export with the keyword option ticked, and never touch an original sitting in a folder on a drive.

Preview shows IPTC keywords in its Inspector and cannot edit them. ExifTool, the free command-line tool, writes them one command at a time:

exiftool -keywords+=heron -keywords+=estuary *.jpg

That appends two IPTC keywords to every JPEG in the folder; the XMP subject field is a separate tag the same command has to name, and there is no preview and no chip to delete when a word is misspelled. The ExifTool GUI guide covers when the command is enough and when a front end over the same engine earns its keep.

Next: the Metadata Editor reference covers the categories, modes and validation in full, and Metadata Review covers the read-only check. For the rest of what the editor can write — captions, creator contact, rights — see the photo metadata editor guide; for wildlife collections, see organising wildlife photos by species.