How to Remove EXIF Data on Mac

Preview ships on every Mac and it can delete the GPS coordinates from a photo without installing anything. Be clear about the limit before you rely on it: this removes location only. Camera make and model, serial number, lens, exposure settings, and the capture timestamp all survive.

1. Open the photo in Preview (double-click it, or right-click → Open With → Preview).
2. Choose Tools → Show Inspector, or press ⌘I.
3. Click the (i) info tab, then the GPS tab. It only appears if the photo actually has coordinates — no GPS tab means there is no location to remove.
4. Click Remove Location Info at the bottom of the pane.
5. Save the file with ⌘S. Preview edits the original in place, so duplicate the file first (⌘D in Finder) if you want to keep the coordinates somewhere.

Stripping everything in Preview

There is no menu command for it, but there is a reliable trick: copy the pixels into a brand-new document and the metadata is left behind.

1. With the photo open, press ⌘A to select all, then ⌘C to copy.
2. Choose File → New from Clipboard (⌘N).
3. Save the new document. It is drawn from the raw pixel data, so it carries no EXIF block at all.

The catch: this re-encodes the image, so you lose a little JPEG quality, and it silently drops the ICC color profile along with everything else. It is fine for a photo headed to a website or a message. For an original you plan to keep, use ExifTool below — it removes the metadata without touching a single pixel. Either way, verify the result rather than trusting the method.

ExifTool is the tool of record for this job. It rewrites the metadata segments of a file and copies the compressed image data across unchanged, so a stripped JPEG is pixel-for-pixel identical to the original. It handles JPEG, PNG, TIFF, HEIC, and RAW.

Install it:

brew install exiftool

No Homebrew? The ExifTool site publishes a signed macOS .pkg installer that puts exiftool on your PATH with no package manager involved.

Strip everything:

exiftool -all= photo.jpg

Run it that way and ExifTool leaves the untouched file next to it as photo.jpg_original. That backup is a safety net, but it still holds the full original metadata — including the GPS coordinates — so delete the _original files once you have checked the result, or skip creating them with -overwrite_original.

The variations worth knowing:

# Remove only GPS coordinates, keep camera settings
exiftool -gps:all= -overwrite_original photo.jpg

# A whole folder, recursively
exiftool -all= -overwrite_original -r ~/Pictures/album

# Only JPEGs and HEICs, recursively
exiftool -all= -overwrite_original -r -ext jpg -ext jpeg -ext heic ~/Pictures

# Strip metadata but keep the colour profile so colours stay correct
exiftool -all= --icc_profile:all -overwrite_original photo.jpg

# Write clean copies to another folder, leaving the originals alone
exiftool -all= -o ~/Desktop/clean/ -r ~/Pictures/album

Drag the folder in. Type exiftool -all= -overwrite_original -r followed by a space, then drag a folder from Finder onto the Terminal window. macOS pastes the full path, escaping included — quicker than typing it and impossible to typo.

Watch the colour profile. -all= deletes the embedded ICC profile too. For a photo bound for the web that is usually fine, since browsers assume sRGB. But Macs shoot and edit in Display P3 by default, and dropping the profile from a P3 file makes the colours shift — often visibly, on saturated reds and greens. The --icc_profile:all variant above keeps it.

macOS keeps its own metadata, too. Separate from EXIF, the filesystem attaches extended attributes to a file: where it was downloaded from, whether it is quarantined, Finder tags. Run xattr -l photo.jpg to see them and xattr -c photo.jpg to clear them. Most of these are stripped in transit by email and messaging apps, but they survive a copy to a USB stick or a shared folder.

ImageOptim

A free, open-source drag-and-drop optimizer. Drop a folder of photos on the window and it shrinks each file and discards the metadata as part of the same pass. It is the fastest route from "a hundred photos" to "a hundred clean, smaller photos."

Two things to know. First, ImageOptim overwrites the files you drop on it, in place, with no backup — copy the folder before you drag it in. Second, check Preferences before the first run: it has explicit controls for what to preserve, and you probably want to keep the colour profile while dropping everything else.

It also re-encodes the images, which is the entire point of an optimizer but does mean it is the wrong tool for archival originals.

ExifCleaner

Free and open source, a drag-and-drop window that runs ExifTool underneath. If you want ExifTool's thoroughness and lossless behaviour but not its command line, this is the answer. It handles batches of images, video, and PDFs.

Like ImageOptim, it modifies files in place — work on copies.

ExifTool itself, for a real batch

Once you are past a few hundred files, or you need to strip GPS while keeping copyright, the command line stops being the harder option:

# Clean copies of a whole library into ~/Desktop/clean, originals untouched
exiftool -all= -o ~/Desktop/clean/ -r ~/Pictures/album

# GPS only, across every photo in a delivery folder
exiftool -gps:all= -overwrite_original -r ~/shoots/2026-06

Avoid the App Store search 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. For the cross-platform picture, see our guide to batch removing EXIF data from multiple photos.

Stop it at the source

A photo with no coordinates needs no stripping. If your Mac library syncs from an iPhone, the location was attached when the shutter fired — see remove EXIF from iPhone photos for turning camera geotagging off and for the share-sheet location toggle that handles one-off sends.