How to Remove EXIF and GPS Data From Photos on a Mac

Every photo a phone takes is stamped with where you were standing.

Not the city. The building. iPhones and most Android phones write GPS latitude and longitude into the file to within a few metres whenever location access is on for the camera, which it is by default. The picture of your kitchen you just listed on a marketplace says where your kitchen is.

This is not news to privacy people. It has been the reason a fugitive was located from a magazine photo and the reason a TV presenter’s cropped photos turned out to contain the uncropped originals. What is still surprising is how few people know their Mac already has a button for most of it, and how many reach for an "EXIF remover" website instead — which solves a privacy problem by uploading the private file to a stranger.

What a photo actually carries

EXIF is a small block of tagged fields written by the camera at capture time. Alongside it a file may also hold XMP (edit history, often from Lightroom or Photos), IPTC (captions, credits, keywords) and, in many phone JPEGs, an entire second image. The fields that matter:

• GPS latitude, longitude and altitude, and a GPS timestamp. The one that locates your home, your child’s school or your client’s office.
• The exact capture time, usually with a time-zone offset. A set of photos is a timeline of where you were and when.
• Make and model — "Apple iPhone 16 Pro" — and on many cameras the body serial number and lens serial number, which tie every photo from that device together across accounts and sites.
• Owner name, artist and copyright fields, filled in automatically by some cameras and editing apps.
• Software and host computer, which can name the machine the picture was edited on.
• An embedded thumbnail. Generated at capture time and frequently not updated when the photo is edited. Crop someone out, and a small copy of the original crop can still be sitting inside the file.
• A second embedded image. Several phone cameras use a block called MPF to store depth maps or an uncropped version alongside the main picture.

How to see it

Before removing anything, look. Three free ways:

• Preview. Open the photo, press ⌘I for the Inspector and choose the "i" tab. The EXIF tab lists the camera fields; if there is a GPS tab, the photo is location-tagged and it shows you the spot on a map.
• Photos. Select the picture and press ⌘I. The info panel shows camera, lens, exposure and, when present, a map.
• Terminal. mdls IMG_4021.jpg prints what Spotlight indexed, including kMDItemLatitude and kMDItemLongitude when they exist.

None of the three shows everything. XMP, IPTC and the embedded thumbnail are largely invisible to all of them. But GPS and capture time — the two that matter most — show up in each, and thirty seconds in the Inspector is the fastest way to find out whether a given picture is a problem.

The built-in ways to remove it

For location, macOS and iOS give you real controls, and they are the right first answer:

Preview — in the Inspector’s GPS tab, click Remove Location Info, then save. One photo at a time, location only.

Photos — select pictures and choose Image → Location → Hide Location. Better still, when exporting, File → Export has a Location Information checkbox; untick it and the exported copies leave without GPS while your library keeps it.

iPhone share sheet — tap Share, then Options at the top of the sheet, and turn Location off before sending. This is the single most useful habit on this page, because it fixes the problem at the moment of sharing, on the device most photos are shared from.

For everything, there is one more built-in route. Select the photos in the Finder, right-click, Quick Actions → Convert Image, and leave Preserve Metadata unticked. The output is a new image with the metadata gone, and it handles a whole selection at once.

And if you live in the Terminal, exiftool from Homebrew is the reference tool: exiftool -all= photo.jpg removes everything and keeps the original as photo.jpg_original. It is free, exhaustive and scriptable, and it is what most of the websites run behind their upload form.

Where the built-in ways run out

Each of those is genuinely good. Between them they leave three gaps:

The location tools only do location. Preview, Photos and the share sheet remove GPS and leave the capture time, the device model, the serial numbers, the software fields and the embedded thumbnail exactly where they were. For a photo going on a public listing, that is most of the job, not all of it.

The everything tool re-encodes. The Finder’s Convert Image removes metadata because it decodes the photo and writes it out again. That works, and it also costs a generation of JPEG compression on a picture you only wanted to clean — and it can produce a *larger* file than the one you started with. Cleaning a photo should not change the photo.

None of them tells you what it removed. You click a button and trust it. For something you are doing for privacy reasons, a receipt matters.

exiftool closes all three — it is lossless and it is thorough — but it is a command-line tool whose documentation runs to several hundred options, and most people who need to clean a photo before a marketplace listing are not going to install Homebrew to do it.

The strange logic of an "EXIF remover" website

Search for how to remove EXIF data and a good part of the results are websites offering to do it for you: drop the photo on the page, download the clean copy.

Be fair about what that involves. Some of these run entirely in your browser and never upload anything, and a few say so clearly and show it. Others upload the file to a server, process it there, and delete it on a timer. From the outside, as a visitor, you usually cannot tell which one you are using.

And the file you are being asked to hand over is, by definition, the one you have just decided is too revealing to share. You found it necessary to strip the location from a photo before giving it to a buyer you will meet once; uploading the unstripped original to an operator you will never meet is the opposite of that decision. Removing metadata is a matter of skipping a few blocks in a file already on your disk. It needs no server.

Doing it without touching the pixels

Dhito ships around 45 local file tools, and Strip metadata is the one built for this job. Reach it by right-clicking a photo in the results, multi-selecting a batch and using the selection bar, opening the Tools tab, or just typing strip exif or remove gps into the search box. You can also drag a photo onto the window or ⌘V it in, so it works on a file you never indexed.

What it does, concretely:

• It does not re-encode. A JPEG is a list of segments, and the compressed picture is one of them. Strip metadata copies that across byte-for-byte and leaves out the segments carrying metadata. The pixels that come out are the pixels that went in. Same for PNG chunks and WEBP's container.
• It removes all of it, not just GPS. EXIF (with GPS and the embedded thumbnail inside it), XMP, the Photoshop/IPTC block, JPEG comments, PNG text chunks, vendor blocks, and the MPF second image some phones hide in their JPEGs.
• It keeps the colour profile. The ICC profile identifies no one, and removing it visibly shifts colours on wide-gamut photos, so it stays. Removing it would be a cost with no privacy benefit.
• It gives you a receipt. The result row names what came out and how much — *EXIF, XMP, Embedded second image (MPF) removed (1.2 MB)* — rather than asking you to trust it. A photo with nothing to remove gets a plain "carries no metadata" and no pointless duplicate file.
• It runs on the Mac. There is no upload step to switch off because there is no upload path.

And the same four guarantees that apply to every tool:

1. Nothing is ever overwritten. IMG_4021.jpg becomes IMG_4021-clean.jpg beside it; the original, metadata and all, stays where it was for your own archive. If the folder is read-only, the result goes to Downloads and the row says so. 2. Undo is the Trash. The Finder’s own Put Back works whether or not Dhito is running. 3. Bulk runs report honestly. Select forty photos and it is one job; two failures name the two files and keep the other thirty-eight. 4. Results chain. The clean copy appears at the top of the results, so the next verb — resize it for the listing, compress it under the upload limit, combine six into one PDF — runs on the copy you just cleaned.

Two limitations, stated plainly

Strip metadata takes JPG, PNG and WEBP — not HEIC. Those are the three formats whose metadata can be removed without re-compressing. For an iPhone HEIC, use Convert to JPG instead: it re-renders the picture, so the output carries no metadata at all. The HEIC post covers that route in full.

A lossless strip can turn a photo sideways. Phones store portrait photos as landscape pixels plus an Orientation tag telling the viewer to rotate them. Remove all metadata losslessly and the tag goes too, so the picture displays the way it was stored. This is the same trap most online strippers fall into silently. If it happens, run Compress — or Convert to PNG or WEBP — on that photo instead: those re-render the image upright and write no metadata, at the price of one re-encode. HEIC files converted to JPG in Dhito never hit this, because the rotation is applied while decoding.

Which one, when

A photo is the most revealing file most people share, and almost all of what it reveals is invisible until you look. Check the Inspector before a picture goes anywhere public. For location, use the switches Apple already gave you. When the job is the whole file — capture time, device, serials, the thumbnail you forgot was there — it should be done on the machine the photo is already on, it should leave the picture itself alone, and it should tell you what it took out.