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Digital cameras, smartphones, and image-editing applications embed several different timestamps inside photos and videos. Some record when a photo was taken, some when it was digitized, some when the file was saved, and video files carry an additional family of timestamps used by QuickTime-based players and Apple Photos.
The Remove EXIF content creation timestamp action strips these embedded timestamps from the files you drop on it. Use it when you want to share photos without revealing when they were taken, or to clean up imported files where the wrong dates were written by an earlier tool.
Each checkbox controls one category of timestamp. The sections below describe what each category means and the exact list of metadata tags removed.
The shooting date is the moment the photo was captured — the “date taken” value shown by most photo-management applications (Apple Photos, Lightroom, Finder’s “Get Info” window for images, etc.).
This is the most commonly used and most meaningful date on a photo. If you share a photo publicly and you don’t want the capture time known, this is the field to remove.
On many cameras the same date is also written to the XMP metadata block, and Photoshop writes a separate XMP-photoshop:DateCreated tag when saving from a RAW file. All three variants are removed together to avoid one tool picking up the date from a place another tool didn’t touch.
Tags removed:
EXIF:DateTimeOriginalXMP:DateTimeOriginalXMP-exif:DateTimeOriginalXMP-photoshop:DateCreatedThe digitization date records when a digital version of the photo was produced. On a digital camera this usually equals the shooting date. On a scanned film photo or a photo reprocessed through post-production software, it can differ and reflects the scanner or processing date.
Some workflows treat this as “the date the image entered the digital world.” Removing it is worth doing alongside the shooting date for a complete privacy scrub.
Tags removed:
EXIF:DateTimeDigitizedXMP:DateTimeDigitizedXMP-exif:DateTimeDigitizedIPTC is a metadata standard used heavily by news organizations, stock-photo agencies, and photo-cataloguing software. It stores the creation date as a pair of separate date and time fields (and a second pair for “digital creation” workflows).
Most consumer photo applications do not display IPTC dates, but they are read by professional tools (Photo Mechanic, older versions of Bridge, news wire systems). Enable this option to ensure no IPTC-based tool can recover the creation time.
Tags removed:
IPTC:DateCreatedIPTC:TimeCreatedIPTC:DigitalCreationDateIPTC:DigitalCreationTimeThese are dates that describe when the file itself was created or last modified — typically written by image-editing software when saving a file, not by the camera at capture time. This is not the same as the file creation and file modification date shown by the Finder; those are file system attributes that are not embedded in the files themselves.
On a photo that has been through Photoshop, Affinity Photo, Preview, or similar, these dates tell you when the edit happened, not when the subject was photographed. Removing them prevents tools from mistaking an edit timestamp for a capture timestamp, and removes another potentially identifying trace of your workflow.
The EXIF DateTime tag is the original TIFF-era “last modified” field and is also cleared here.
Tags removed:
EXIF:CreateDateEXIF:ModifyDateEXIF:DateTimeXMP:CreateDateXMP:ModifyDateThe content creation date is the field Apple Photos, Finder, and iOS use as the “date” of a video. It is also written to some images taken by modern iPhones.
If you want a video to stop showing its original capture date in Apple Photos or the Finder’s Get Info window, this is the most important field to remove.
The tag exists both as a group-qualified QuickTime field and as an unqualified name that some writers use; both are removed for completeness.
Tags removed:
QuickTime:ContentCreateDateContentCreateDateVideo files built on the QuickTime container format (.mov, .mp4, .m4v, .m4a, .3gp) store a whole family of internal timestamps: one for the overall file, one for each media track inside the file, and one for the media samples themselves. Different players and tools read different ones.
This option removes every QuickTime-container timestamp other than the content creation date (which has its own checkbox above, because it is the most user-visible one).
Older video editors, ExifTool, MediaInfo, and similar inspection tools typically read one or more of these. Removing them all ensures the file no longer advertises when it was recorded, written, or last modified through any video tool.
Tags removed:
QuickTime:CreateDateQuickTime:CreationDateQuickTime:ModifyDateQuickTime:MediaCreateDateQuickTime:MediaModifyDateQuickTime:TrackCreateDateQuickTime:TrackModifyDate