Given a measure ν on a regular planar domain D, the Gaussian multiplicative chaos measure of ν studied in this paper is the random measure ^ν^ obtained as the limit of the exponential of the γ-parameter circle averages of the Gaussian free field on D weighted by ν. We investigate the dimensional and geometric properties of these random measures. We first show that if ν is a finite Borel measure on D with exact dimension α>0, then the associated GMC measure ^ν^ is nondegenerate and is almost surely exact dimensional with dimension α-γ2/2, provided γ2/2<α. We then show that if νt is a Hölder-continuously parameterized family of measures, then the total mass of ^νt^ varies Hölder-continuously with t, provided that γ is sufficiently small...