Batch Remove EXIF Data From Multiple Photos at Once

The Properties dialog most people use on a single file works identically on a multi-selection, and almost nobody knows it. Select photos with Ctrl+click, or Ctrl+A for the whole folder, then:

1. Right-click the selection and choose Properties (or press Alt + Enter).
2. Open the Details tab.
3. Click Remove Properties and Personal Information.
4. Choose Create a copy with all possible properties removed, then OK.

Windows writes a cleaned duplicate of every selected file, named photo - Copy.jpg, into the same folder. It does not re-encode the image, so there is no quality loss. For a few dozen holiday photos this beats installing anything.

Two limits worth knowing. The remover only handles formats Windows has a metadata handler for — JPEG and TIFF are fine, while HEIC and RAW files like CR2 and NEF often grey the option out or clear only part of the data.

More importantly, it blanks the EXIF directory entries but leaves the string values themselves in the file as orphaned bytes. Normal viewers report a clean file; a strings utility still finds the camera make and model. Our Windows EXIF removal guide covers that flaw in full. If the photos could face real scrutiny, use ExifTool instead.

ImageOptim — drag a folder, done

Free and open source. Drop a folder of photos on the window and it compresses each file and discards the metadata in the same pass. It is the shortest path from "a hundred photos" to "a hundred clean photos."

It overwrites the files you drop on it, in place, with no backup — duplicate the folder first. Open Preferences before the first run: you almost certainly want to keep the colour profile while dropping everything else. And because it re-encodes, it is the wrong tool for archival originals.

ExifCleaner — ExifTool without the terminal

Also free and open source, a drag-and-drop window running ExifTool underneath. You get ExifTool's thoroughness and its lossless behaviour without typing a command. It handles batches of images, video, and PDFs. Like ImageOptim, it modifies files in place — work on copies.

Skip the App Store results for this. "EXIF remover" apps that charge for a batch unlock are doing what these two free tools do, and the ones that upload your photos to a server to do it are a worse trade than the problem they solve.

Apple Photos, if you only care about GPS

Select any number of photos in the Photos app, then Image → Location → Remove Location. It applies to the whole selection. This clears the coordinates and nothing else — camera model, serial number, and timestamps all survive. Useful when location is the only thing you are worried about, and misleading if you assumed it did more.

The full picture, including what Apple Photos actually writes when you export, is in our Mac EXIF removal guide.

Speed, on a big batch

The instinct is to loop over files in a shell script. Don't. Each iteration starts a fresh exiftool process, and ExifTool is a Perl program with a few hundred milliseconds of startup cost — multiplied by ten thousand files, that is most of an hour spent launching an interpreter. Hand it the whole list at once and it starts once:

# An argument file: one path per line, ExifTool walks the list itself
find ~/Pictures -name '*.jpg' -newermt '6 months ago' > /tmp/strip-list.txt
exiftool -all= -overwrite_original -@ /tmp/strip-list.txt

The same idea on Windows, where the guide to removing EXIF on Windows also covers the quoting trap that makes PowerShell -if conditions silently match nothing:

Get-ChildItem C:\Photos -Recurse -Filter *.jpg |
  Select-Object -ExpandProperty FullName |
  Set-Content -Encoding utf8 $env:TEMP\strip-list.txt

exiftool -all= -overwrite_original -@ $env:TEMP\strip-list.txt

Spot-checking a single photo tells you nothing about the four hundred beside it. Ask the whole folder at once, and ask it the question that matters: which files still have a location?

# List any file in the tree that still carries GPS — silence means clean
exiftool -r -if '$gpslatitude' -filename ~/Pictures/Clean

# Everything that survived, file by file, as a table
exiftool -T -filename -gps:all -make -model -serialnumber -r ~/Pictures/Clean

# Count files that still have any EXIF at all
exiftool -r -if '$exif:all' -filename ~/Pictures/Clean | wc -l

In PowerShell, single-quote the -if condition exactly as shown. Double quotes let PowerShell expand $gpslatitude to an empty string before ExifTool sees it, and the command matches nothing — which looks identical to a clean folder.

No terminal? Drop a handful of the cleaned files back into our EXIF viewer and open the All tab. It lists every tag it can find, so an empty table is a clean file. Sample from across the batch — especially any HEIC or RAW files, which are where a batch usually failed.