Strip metadata from a folder of photos on Mac

You’re publishing a blog post or building a portfolio and you’ve got 200+ photos to upload. You want all of them clean — no GPS, no camera serials, no timestamps — but doing them one at a time in Preview would take half a day.

Why batch matters

Each photo carries metadata that’s invisible until someone runs exiftool on it. Stripping per-file works, but a folder-wide pass is what you actually need when prepping a website or sharing a year of holiday photos.

The native way: exiftool

The reliable Terminal option:

brew install exiftool
cd /path/to/photos
exiftool -all= -overwrite_original *.jpg *.jpeg *.heic *.png

That wipes every metadata tag from every supported image in the folder. -overwrite_original skips the backup _original files (otherwise you’ll have twice the files).

For nested folders:

exiftool -all= -overwrite_original -r .

-r recurses. Add -ext jpg -ext jpeg -ext heic to limit to specific extensions.

GPS only, in batch

If you want to keep camera and timestamp info but kill GPS:

exiftool -gps:all= -overwrite_original *.jpg

The native way: Preview

There’s no Preview batch action for EXIF removal. You can select multiple files and run Inspector → Remove Location Info per file, but it’s tedious — exiftool is the right tool for batches.

The faster way

Drop the entire folder into Melt. “Strip metadata” is on by default, so every output file is clean. Set the output format to match the source (or convert at the same time), pick a quality, click Compress. Handles a few hundred photos quickly and gives you visible progress. Download Melt.

Batch strip in Melt

1. Open Melt.
2. Drag the folder in.
3. Match output format to the source (JPEG → JPEG, etc.).
4. Set quality to 92+ if you want minimal re-compression loss.
5. Confirm "Strip metadata" is enabled.
6. Click Compress.

Verifying it worked

Spot-check the output with:

exiftool output.jpg

You should see basic file info (size, dimensions) but no GPS, no camera fields, no timestamps from the original capture.

What you lose, what you keep

Batch stripping loses every photo’s date, GPS, camera info, and exposure settings — all of it gone, by design. The image pixels are unchanged (or only minimally re-compressed depending on quality settings). For publishing or public sharing, this is the right move. For personal archives, keep your originals untouched in a separate folder and only strip the working copies.