Applies to macOS Ventura through macOS 26

The short answer: every photo you take carries hidden metadata: often the exact GPS position, the precise time of capture, your camera or phone model, sometimes even a lens serial number. All of it travels with the file when you share it. On a Mac you can strip the location from copies you share via Apple Photos (untick Location Information on export) or Preview (Remove Location Info), strip anything with the free command-line ExifTool, or clean whole batches with a dedicated tool. What the big photo platforms do to your metadata is not something to rely on; more on that below.

A disclosure: I’m the developer of A Better Finder Attributes, a paid utility that does this in batches, along with many other file-date and metadata jobs. The free routes are covered honestly first.

Three boundary checks, because removing is only one of three metadata jobs:

  • You want to remove metadata before sharing → this guide.
  • You want to change an embedded date (wrong camera clock, scans) → change the date a photo was taken.
  • You want to add or fix location metadata (your camera has no GPS) → that’s the opposite job; it’s what Media Location Tagger is for.

What’s actually inside your photos

Point a metadata viewer at an ordinary iPhone photo and you’ll find well over a hundred fields. The ones that matter for privacy:

  • GPS location. Not roughly: latitude and longitude to a few metres, plus altitude. iPhones even record the direction you were facing and your speed at the moment you pressed the shutter. Enough to identify your home from a single shared photo.
  • Timestamps. When the photo was taken, digitized and last edited, down to fractions of a second, in several variants across EXIF, IPTC and XMP.
  • Equipment. Camera or phone model, lens, and on many cameras a serial number that ties every photo you’ve ever published to the same body.
  • Ownership and workflow. Artist and copyright fields, the software you edited with, and maker notes, a large opaque block in which camera makers store everything from focus points to firmware versions.

Videos carry their own family of embedded metadata tags: creation dates in the QuickTime container (usually in UTC) and, on iPhone footage, GPS coordinates in two places.

To see it for yourself: open a photo in Preview and choose Tools ▸ Show Location Info; the GPS tab even shows the spot on a map.

Before you share: what platforms do (and don’t) strip

The big social networks re-encode uploads and drop most metadata from the publicly served copies. That is why “Instagram removes EXIF” is only half-true: the copy strangers download is scrubbed, but you’ve still handed the original data to the platform, and its privacy policy decides what happens to it. And the places where photos travel unprocessed (email, most messengers set to “original quality”, cloud-drive links, your own website) pass every field along untouched.

The only version you control is the one that leaves your Mac. Strip it there.

Free route 1: Apple Photos, minus the location

For photos in your Photos library, File ▸ Export ▸ Export Photos… has an Include section: untick Location Information and the exported copies go out without GPS coordinates (untick Title, Keywords and Caption too, if you’ve added those). Your originals in the library keep their metadata; this affects only the exported copies, which is exactly what you want.

There are limits, though: it’s an either/or switch for location, not a general metadata scrub. The exported files still carry capture dates and camera details, and it only helps for photos that live in Photos.

Free route 2: Preview, for one-off location removal

For a photo sitting in a folder: open it in Preview, choose Tools ▸ Show Location Info (greyed out if the photo carries none), and at the bottom of the GPS tab: Remove Location Info. Quick and built-in, but one file at a time, location only.

Free route 3: ExifTool

The free command-line ExifTool removes anything, from any number of files:

# strip everything except the colour profile (recommended full scrub)
exiftool -all= -tagsfromfile @ -icc_profile photo.jpg

# location only, whole folder
exiftool -gps:all= -xmp:geotag= /path/to/photos

ExifTool keeps _original backups unless told otherwise. The caveats are the usual command-line ones: no preview of what will be removed, and flag syntax with real teeth. Run -all= without the -tagsfromfile @ -icc_profile clause and the colour profile is deleted too, which can visibly shift a wide-gamut photo’s colours on the web.

The batch tool: A Better Finder Attributes

Metadata removal in A Better Finder Attributes comes as three actions of increasing thoroughness. Drop files (or whole folders) on the window, pick the action, press Perform Changes.

  • Remove geolocation metadata tag(s) is the before-sharing essential. It removes the entire EXIF GPS block: not just the coordinates but also altitude, speed, direction and the GPS timestamps, plus the city/state/country names that cataloguing software writes into IPTC and XMP fields, and the GPS coordinates embedded in iPhone videos. Everything else stays: dates, camera, your carefully written keywords.
  • Remove EXIF content creation timestamp is the when scrub. Six checkboxes cover the shooting date, the digitization date, IPTC creation dates, file-edit dates, and the two families of video timestamps (exact tag lists in the manual). One honest technical note: QuickTime video dates cannot actually be deleted from the container, so the app overwrites them with the format’s zero date instead; the effect is the same, the original capture time is gone.
  • Strip all metadata tags is the full scrub for anything that leaves the house. EXIF, IPTC, XMP, GPS, maker notes, serial numbers, editing history: afterwards a metadata dump shows nothing but the image’s structural properties (dimensions, encoding). A Preserve colour profile (ICC) checkbox, on by default, keeps the colour profile through the scrub, so Display P3 photos don’t shift colours; the profile describes how colours should be displayed and contains nothing personal.

All three handle batches of mixed formats and skip incompatible files rather than touching them. The geolocation and timestamp actions also cover the RAW formats of all major camera makers; the full strip works on JPEG, HEIC, PNG, TIFF and QuickTime-based video. File-system dates (what the Finder’s Get Info shows) are deliberately left alone; embedded metadata and file dates are different things.

It’s version 7, US$29.95 / €29.95 as a one-time purchase, with a free trial.

A tour of what’s hiding in your files, and the removal actions in practice, including what professional photographers may want to change rather than remove before delivering to clients.

A Better Finder Attributes' Remove geolocation metadata tag(s) action over six iPhone HEIC photos and two JPGs, all marked compatible with green ticks; both removal checkboxes are on and the preview pane shows the selected photo's GPS latitude, longitude and iPhone lens details

The before-sharing essential: GPS and location name fields removed from a batch in one pass; dates and keywords untouched.

A Better Finder Attributes' Strip all metadata tags action over a mixed batch of HEIC photos, JPGs and an MP4 video, all marked compatible; the Preserve colour profile (ICC) checkbox is ticked and the preview pane shows the selected photo's city, country and GPS fields about to be removed

The full scrub: everything except the colour profile and the pixels themselves.

The tricky cases

  • Videos. The container’s date fields can’t be removed outright (the format requires them), only zeroed. iPhone videos also keep GPS in two different places, and both need removing. Use a tool that knows the video fields; the image-centric ones miss them.
  • Your originals vs. the shared copy. Metadata removal is permanent; there is no “restore metadata” for a stripped file. Keep your originals complete (their metadata is useful to you: it’s what sorts your library) and strip copies on their way out.
  • Edited exports. Exporting from an editor doesn’t reliably clean a file: most editors copy the original’s EXIF into the export, and add more (their own software tag, edit timestamps). Strip the export, not just the source.
  • The filename also talks. IMG_20230615_143000.jpg reveals the capture date with no metadata at all, and a stripped file with that name still tells the story. Batch-rename the shared copies to something neutral.

Common pitfalls

  • Stripping the library instead of the copies. Remove metadata from your archive and your photo software loses the dates and locations it sorts by. Share-time copies, always.
  • Trusting the platform. What a social network strips today it may not strip tomorrow, and the messenger set to “original quality” strips nothing.
  • Removing the colour profile along with the metadata. A too-aggressive scrub (ExifTool’s bare -all=) deletes the ICC profile; wide-gamut photos then render dull or oversaturated in some browsers. Keep the profile; it contains nothing personal.
  • Expecting the file dates to change. After a metadata scrub the Finder still shows the file’s creation date, because that lives in the file system, not the file. If that matters for what you’re sharing, change the file dates too.

FAQ

How do I remove metadata from a photo on a Mac for free? Location only: Preview’s Inspector (Tools ▸ Show Location Info, then Remove Location Info) or a Photos export with Location Information unticked. Everything: ExifTool on the command line (exiftool -all= -tagsfromfile @ -icc_profile photo.jpg).

Does macOS remove location data automatically when I share photos? No. The Mac’s share sheet and the Finder pass files along with metadata intact. (iOS shows an Options link with a location toggle when sharing from the Photos app; macOS Photos only does this on export.)

Do Instagram, Facebook and the like remove EXIF data? From the copies they serve publicly, largely yes. But you’ve still uploaded the original metadata to the platform itself, and email, messengers and cloud links generally preserve everything. Strip before sharing rather than relying on the destination.

Can I remove metadata from videos too? Yes, with the right tool. Video dates live in the QuickTime container and can only be zeroed, not deleted (the effect is the same), and iPhone videos store GPS coordinates in two separate fields.

Does removing metadata reduce image quality? No. Metadata lives alongside the image data; removing it doesn’t touch the pixels. The one thing to preserve is the ICC colour profile (A Better Finder Attributes keeps it by default), because removing that can change how colours display.

What about the “date created” the Finder shows after stripping? That’s the file-system date, stored outside the file; metadata removal deliberately leaves it alone. It doesn’t travel with uploads the way embedded metadata does, but it does travel with the file on AirDrop or a USB stick; here’s how to change it.

Frank Reiff is the developer of A Better Finder Attributes and Media Location Tagger, Mac file-management utilities in continuous development since 1996. Start with How to change file and photo dates on a Mac, or get in touch with a metadata problem this guide doesn’t cover.