Exifer 

Exifer is a small free tool that will help you to back up and restore the metadata automatically embedded in JPEG images by many digital cameras. This information (known as EXIF tags) usually disappears when you process and save your digital photos using an image processing tool. Exifer can also read IPTC metadata from both JPEG and TIFF image files.

The information of the EXIF tags includes data about the camera used, the copyright of the image, and some technical information about how the photograph was taken (orientation, resolution, etc.). IPTC metadata include some of information stored in the EXIF tags plus a large list of other items aimed to describe all the non-technical aspects that float around a digital image. These include the author’s name and title, a description of the image, creation and distribution data, categories, and keywords, URL, software used, etc. All this valuable information usually gets lost whenever you use an image editor to do the simplest things – rotate the image, crop it to leave out unwanted parts of the picture, or add some nice digital effects. When this happens you have two options – either you insert the information into the image manually (provided that you remember all the data), or you can use Exifer to back up all these tags before editing the image, and to restore them after it has been processed.

If all you need to do is rotate, crop, or add a watermark to your image, Exifer can do it for you. Its rotation utility guarantees that no image quality and no EXIF/IPTC tags are lost in the process. The program also detects which image processing software tools you have installed in your system, so that you can still use them without leaving Exifer.

At the time of writing this review, the program was already considered as discontinued by its developer. Nevertheless, it is still available for download, and, what is more important, it still does what it was designed to do.