FYI: I just recently added simple Exif viewing/editing/clearing to my "xv"-inspired image editor pxv: https://github.com/linsomniac/pxv

My primary goal was to have my core "xv" muscle-memory usable through a simple tool that didn't require me building the original xv (since you can't just apt install it), because these days I'm not using xv much.

But I've since added a few features that xv doesn't have like the Exif and also image annotation, plus beefed up the image enhancement to be very much like XVs.