What it carries, where that matters, and how to strip it. Updated July 2026.
Most people arrive here about to share a specific photo, worried about one specific thing: the location. The good news is that the answer often depends on where you are sending it, and for some destinations you do not have to do anything at all. Work out which case you are in first — it saves installing something you do not need.
First
Not everything does, and assuming it does leads people to strip metadata they wanted to keep. Two ways to check on a Mac, no install:
Camera photos — iPhone included — carry coordinates whenever location services were on. macOS screenshots carry almost nothing beyond dimensions and a timestamp. Images that have been through a messaging app once have usually been stripped already.
Then
This decides how much work you have to do, and it is the part most guides skip.
The distinction that matters: a platform stripping metadata protects other viewers, not you from the platform. If your concern is the recipient, the platform may have handled it. If your concern is the service itself, only removing it before upload does anything.
Removing it
Open it, ⌘I, the GPS tab, then Remove Location Information, then ⌘S. It removes the location and nothing else — camera, lens, ISO, shutter speed and the exact capture time all stay — and it edits the file in place. For one photo about to be emailed, this is the whole job.
File → Export, and untick Location Information. The copies leave without coordinates. Only works on export, only from your library, and like Preview it leaves the rest of the metadata intact.
Free and open source, and the reference implementation the others are measured against. exiftool -gps:all= *.jpg takes only the location; exiftool -all= *.jpg takes everything. It reads and writes more formats than any app with a window. The trade is that nothing shows you what you are about to remove.
€12, once. It lists what an image actually carries — location, camera, dates, creator fields — in plain language, then removes what you choose: GPS from one photo or a folder in one click, or every field at once. It writes cleaned copies and leaves the originals alone, and it can edit the fields worth keeping rather than only deleting them.
If Preview or the Photos switch covers your case, they are free and already on your Mac. Ours is for when stripping metadata is a routine rather than a one-off, and you want to see the before and after.
ImageOptim also strips metadata, as a side effect of compressing for the web. If your workflow already ends in "make this small for a site", one drag does both — but you cannot see or choose what goes, and the compression is not optional.
Before you strip everything
Capture dates, copyright and creator fields are metadata too. Strip a folder blindly and your own archive loses its timeline and your claim to the work — which is a bigger loss than the one you were guarding against, and it is not reversible.
If the worry is location, remove the location. Reach for "remove everything" when you are handing files to someone you do not want to give a camera serial number to, not as a default.
PX7 Digital makes PX7 Image Metadata, so this page is not neutral. The Preview and Photos steps were carried out on macOS 26.5.2 (build 25F84, Apple silicon) on 31 July 2026; details for the other tools come from their own projects' documentation on the same date. Platform behaviour changes — check before relying on any of it. Tell us if something here is out of date.