How to send a photo without EXIF on Mac

You’re about to email a photo or attach one to a forum post, and you’d rather not send along the GPS coordinates of where you took it plus the model and serial of your camera. macOS doesn’t have an obvious “send without EXIF” button — but there are several ways to make it happen.

What gets shared by default

Email attachments, AirDrop, Messages on Mac, and “Save image as” downloads all preserve EXIF. The photo arrives at the other end with full metadata intact: GPS, timestamps, device info, exposure settings.

Some services do strip:

• iMessage to iPhone/Mac (it actually preserves EXIF, contrary to common belief, except for some Live Photo metadata).
• Instagram and Twitter — strip on upload.
• Most CMS uploads — usually strip, but check yours.

Most don’t, including email and Reddit.

The quickest one-off: Preview

For a single photo:

1. Open the photo in Preview.
2. Tools → Show Inspector.
3. Click (i), then GPS tab → Remove Location Info.
4. File → Export → save as a new file.

That handles GPS, the most sensitive bit. Camera info and timestamps remain.

The thorough one-off: exiftool

brew install exiftool
exiftool -all= -o clean_photo.jpg photo.jpg

The -o flag writes to a new file instead of modifying the original. Attach clean_photo.jpg.

The Mail trick

If you’re attaching in Mail, you can resize on the way out: in the bottom-right of the compose window there’s an Image Size dropdown. “Small” or “Medium” re-encodes and strips some metadata. Not as thorough as a proper EXIF removal — Apple’s exact behaviour varies — but it’s better than nothing.

The faster way

Melt strips EXIF by default. Drag the photo in, keep the same format (so quality stays the same), make sure “Strip metadata” is on, click Compress. Send the result. Download Melt.

Quick clean in Melt

1. Open Melt.
2. Drag the photo in.
3. Match output format to input (JPEG in, JPEG out).
4. Confirm "Strip metadata" is enabled.
5. Click Compress.
6. Send the output file.

A habit worth forming

If you regularly share photos, set up a “Clean export” workflow:

• Keep originals in Photos or a dated folder.
• Run anything you’re about to send through Melt (or exiftool).
• Use the output as the share copy.

That way you never accidentally send a photo with home GPS attached.

What you lose, what you keep

Stripping EXIF deletes timestamps, camera info, and GPS. The image itself is unchanged when you match formats and skip quality changes. The receiver sees a photo with no hidden info — exactly what you want for sharing.