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User Guide

Welcome to the official documentation for Jade GT. Whether you're a professional stock photographer, an archivist, or a hobbyist looking to organise your collection, Jade GT provides the tools you need to manage your photo metadata with speed and precision.

Privacy First Architecture

Your photos never leave your device. Jade GT processes images entirely in your browser. Nothing is uploaded to a server. The only data Jade GT fetches from the cloud is the shared trademark dictionary (a list of restricted words), which is read-only and contains no information about you or your files.

The Jade GT workspace on first load, with the "Open Photos" call-to-action centered on an empty gallery. The Jade GT workspace on first load, with the "Open Photos" call-to-action centered on an empty gallery.
The empty workspace: drop photos here, or click Open Photos to pick them.

Quick Start

Five steps to your first geotagged photo

  1. Open the app and click Open Photos → Select Individual Files. Pick a few JPEGs.
  2. In the Photos panel, click a photo to select it.
  3. Open the Location tab and type an address into the search bar, or paste coordinates.
  4. Click the Commit button in the Details Panel header. Review the summary.
  5. Click Write Changes to Disk. Your files download (Export Mode) or are written in place (Direct Save).

Everything else in this guide is an expansion of those five steps.

Where to next

  • Getting Started

    Loading photos, choosing a saving strategy, and the workspace layout.

  • Preview tab

    The photo's identity dashboard: triage, image preview, and staged edits.

  • Location tab

    Smart Paste, address search, location presets, and GPX track sync.

  • Mobile GPS Logger (Pro)

    Field recording, the Sync Ritual, and computing your camera offset.

  • Tags tab

    Keywords, captions, rights, classification, and Stock Readiness.

  • Compress tab

    AVIF, WebP, and JPEG re-encoding with WASM codecs.

  • Rename tab

    Pattern-based batch renaming with {date}, {city}, and friends.

  • EXIF Info tab

    Time shifting, the EXIF viewer, and the Privacy Scrub.

  • Review & Commit

    The Review Hub: per-category checkboxes and final write-to-disk.

  • Pro Features

    What Pro unlocks, billing, and restoring on a new device.

  • Troubleshooting

    Common failure modes and their fixes.

  • Keyboard Shortcuts

    Every keystroke the app recognises, in one table.

Introduction & Setup

Jade GT is a high-performance photo management tool designed to help you add location data and descriptive information (metadata) to your images. It is built to handle thousands of photos at once while remaining fast and responsive.

System Requirements

Latest Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, or Opera. These browsers support the File System Access API, which is required for Direct Save (in-place writes to your original files).

Apple Safari and Mozilla Firefox are supported for every editing and geocoding feature, but you'll be restricted to Export Mode. Jade GT will download updated copies rather than write back to the originals.

Additional requirements:

  • Hardware Acceleration enabled in your browser so the map and gallery stay smooth.
  • RAM: Jade GT is optimised for efficiency, but working with 2,000+ photos is more comfortable with more RAM available.
  • Per-file limit: individual files up to 50 MB are accepted; larger files are skipped with a warning.

Supported File Formats

Jade GT handles a wide range of photographic formats with specialised engines for metadata writing.

  • Fully supported: JPG, JPEG, PNG, WebP, AVIF, and HEIC. View, edit, and save metadata (IPTC/EXIF/XMP) directly.
    • ExifTool under the hood: the industry-standard ExifTool engine runs in WebAssembly inside your browser, so keywords, subject codes, and scene codes land in the same IPTC and XMP blocks that Adobe Bridge, Lightroom, and Capture One expect.
    • Background pre-warming: the metadata engine loads while you're still picking photos, so your first save doesn't pause to initialise.
  • Professional RAW support (Pro): 500+ formats including .CR2, .CR3, .ARW, .NEF, .ORF, .DNG.
    • Hybrid strategy: Jade GT writes an XMP sidecar next to the original RAW and attempts to write GPS tags directly to the RAW header. Your RAW stays pristine; Lightroom and Capture One read the sidecar.

RAW requires Pro

Free-tier users cannot load RAW files at all. They are skipped at import time. Upgrade to Pro to enable the RAW pipeline.

How Jade GT processes your photos

Reading metadata is multi-threaded; writing is single-threaded for safety. The flow looks like this:

flowchart LR
  A[Open Photos] --> B[EXIF worker pool<br/>parallel reads]
  B --> C[Photos panel<br/>thumbnails + facts]
  C --> D{Edit in any tab}
  D -->|stages a change| E[Pending edits]
  E --> F[Commit / Review Hub]
  F -->|main thread| G[ExifTool WASM<br/>writes back]
  G --> H[Direct Save<br/>or Export ZIP]

Reading is multi-threaded so a 2,000-photo gallery loads quickly. Writing through ExifTool happens on the main thread, one file at a time, so you can trust the on-disk result.

Looking for a printable cheat sheet? See Keyboard Shortcuts. For the precise meaning of EXIF, IPTC, XMP, and similar terms, see the Glossary.