How to strip EXIF metadata from a photo on Mac

You’re about to post a photo from a hike and you don’t really want the world knowing the precise GPS coordinates of where you took it. Phone cameras embed location, timestamps, camera model, and sometimes the device’s serial number into every JPEG. Most websites strip this on upload — but not all, and not always reliably.

Two paths

Native macOS. A few options, none of them especially obvious:

• Preview. Open the image, Tools → Show Inspector, click the (i) tab, then the GPS tab. There’s a “Remove Location Info” button. That removes GPS, but leaves camera model, timestamps, and other EXIF fields intact.

• Photos app. With a photo selected, Image → Location → Hide Location. Same caveat — GPS only.

• Terminal exiftool (third-party, needs brew install exiftool). The thorough option:

  exiftool -all= input.jpg
  

  That wipes every metadata tag. Add -overwrite_original to skip the .original backup file.

Melt. A drag-and-drop Mac app ($9.99 one-time) that strips all EXIF (GPS, camera, timestamps, the lot) by default when it re-encodes an image. So compressing or converting a photo through Melt also cleans it.

Strip EXIF in Melt

1. Open Melt.
2. Drag the photo in.
3. Check that "Strip metadata" is enabled in settings (it's on by default).
4. Pick the same format as the source if you only want to strip EXIF without re-compressing — or pick a lower quality if you want both.
5. Click Compress.

Honest tradeoffs

Removing EXIF deletes potentially useful info too — the timestamp, the camera settings, the lens used. If you care about that data for your own records, work from a copy. Also worth knowing: stripping EXIF doesn’t anonymise the image content itself. Landmarks, street signs, and reflections can still give away a location. EXIF removal handles the easy 80% of the privacy problem; the rest is about what’s actually in the frame.