Check out these three quick ways to get rid of image metadata on your Mac to boost your privacy in this step-by-step tutorial.
Striping away location data, camera name and other personally identifiable metadata from images ensures sensitive details won’t be unknowingly disclosed when sharing online. You can view photo metadata on a Mac using the Finder or the Preview app. Unfortunately, there’s no built-in tool to delete image metadata. For that, you’ll need to use third-party apps and websites.
1. Use the Exif Metadata app to clean image metadata
Exif Metadata is a free app created by the iDownloadBlog team. Available for iPhones, iPads and Apple silicon Macs, this easy to use software helps you quickly remove metadata from locally stored photos.
Download Exif Metadata from the App Store
All you need to do is pick images from the built-in Photos app and the app will instantly remove metadata. The entire process is the same as using the app on an iPhone or iPad.
One major advantage of Exif Metadata is the ability to automatically convert HEIC images (the iPhone’s default shooting format) by converting them into JPG automatically. Other methods in this article don’t work with HEIC images.
2. Delete metadata with ImageOptim
ImageOptim is a tool for reducing image file sizes, but it does more than compress images. With it, you can also delete private EXIF metadata. The Mac, Windows, and Linux app is available for free via the official ImageOptim website.
1) After you’ve downloaded and installed ImageOptim, launch the app and click ImageOptim > Settings or Preferences in the menu bar.
2) Click the General tab and then tick the boxes in the Metadata and Color Profiles section to tell the app to remove metadata and other details from PNG and JPEG files. Optionally, adjust the Quality and Optimization Speed to your liking.
3) Close the settings and get back to the main ImageOptim window.
4) Drag one or more photos and drop them onto the window. A green checkmark appears next to the photos that have finished processing. This may take a minute or more, depending on the selected compression options and the number of images.
Open any processed image in Preview to verify that underlying metadata has been removed; there should be no EXIF or GPS tabs in the inspector window.
3. Strip Exif data on the Squoosh website
Many websites that remove metadata from photos require uploading images to servers, which isn’t ideal for private media. Enter Squoosh.app, a popular online tool for image compression that works offline and has a nice Chrome app.
Follow these steps to remove image metadata with Squoosh.
1) Visit Squoosh.app in a web browser.
2) Drag and drop an image onto its window.
3) Set the Quality slider to 100%.
4) Hit the download arrow to save the image without metadata.
Bonus tip: Windows PC owners can remove metadata from images with the EXIFPurge app. It used to have a macOS version, but it’s no longer available.
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