Remove Metadata From Photos Before Publishing on a Mac

Every photo from a digital camera or phone carries data about itself. The Freedom of the Press Foundation puts it plainly: this information “is attached by default to all photos taken by a digital device”, and its examples are timestamp, location and camera type. For anyone covering a person who could be harmed by being found, that is the exposure. In 2012 Vice published a photo with its location metadata intact and authorities found John McAfee in Guatemala.

The tag count is bigger than a single location field. On an iPhone photo we measured up to 15 GPS tags: latitude, longitude, altitude, a UTC timestamp, and also speed, compass heading and camera bearing. Those results and the tag-by-tag listing are in our guide to what EXIF data contains. News organizations also use the IPTC schema, which the IPTC Photo Metadata Standard describes as covering administrative, descriptive and copyright information about images. That is useful for your own credit line, and a risk when the file came from someone else.

Turn off location at capture, strip it from every file before it leaves your desk, and verify one output. Each step covers a gap the others leave, so a newsroom workflow uses at least two.

• At capture. On an iPhone, Settings, Privacy & Security, Location Services, Camera, Never, per Apple’s own instructions. New photos then carry no coordinates. Photos already taken keep theirs.
• At sharing. Apple’s Share sheet has an Options button with a Location switch; when it is off, “Location Not Included” appears above Options. That affects the copy you send, not the stored file.
• On the Mac, before upload. Strip the folder with a tool you can verify. This is the layer that covers files shot by someone else, files from a camera with no location switch, and the older photos in an archive.

Do not count on resizing. In our measurements, a sips -Z 2000 resize left all 14 GPS tags on the test file intact, and converting HEIC to JPEG carried the coordinates across on every route we tried, Smol’s Convert included. The full tag-by-tag results are in stripping GPS from photos before you share them. Stripping the file is also not enough on its own: the scene can still give away a place, as covered in stripping EXIF is no longer enough.

Use Compress for web-ready files and Strip Metadata when you want the pixels untouched. Smol’s image compression strips metadata by default, and the strip operation works on its own without re-encoding the image.

Work on a copy of the folder, drop it into Smol, run one pass, and spot-check. Smol takes whole folders and mixed file types in one batch, so photos and PDFs from the same source go together.

1. 1

   Copy the folder you received

   Keep the originals untouched and offline or in your secure storage. Smol writes a copy with a _compressed suffix by default and does not overwrite the original.

2. 2

   Drag the folder into Smol

   Images and PDFs can go in together.

3. 3

   Choose Strip Metadata, or Compress with stripping on

   Use Strip Metadata when pixels must stay as shot. Use Compress when you also want a smaller, web-sized file.

4. 4

   Run it, then check one output

   Open an output in Preview and choose Tools, Show Location Info. A stripped file shows nothing. For a deeper check, open it in a metadata viewer such as ExifTool.

5. 5

   Add the credit back and publish the stripped copy

   Never publish from the original folder.

Desks that publish through a CMS can pair this with our notes on newsroom CMS images, and files that must stay private are covered in confidential documents. If you prefer the terminal, the timed comparison of Automator, shell loops and one batch pass over a 90-file folder is in batch-stripping a whole folder, and the command line route is in removing metadata from the Terminal.

Documents carry their own history. The Freedom of the Press Foundation notes that Google Docs, Word files and PDFs “are happy to reveal where they originated, who worked on them, and when”. In a PDF that usually means the author, the creating software and the dates in the document properties.

OpenNews’s newsroom training guide goes further and says removing metadata from files provided by sources before sharing or publishing “is critical”. It also warns that some formats keep revision histories and that obscured text can remain in the file. Smol’s Strip Metadata clears a PDF’s document properties. It does not redact, and it does not remove text you drew over.

One more limit from our own testing: a cleaned PDF can still be reversible. In removing metadata from a PDF we showed that a free tool can undo some clean-ups unless the file is rewritten afterward, so we do not call the result permanent. PDF presets in Smol do not strip metadata at all, and in our compression test the Tiny preset kept the document properties on a synthetic file.

Free and built-in options come first, and several are good. The question is which gap you need to close.

For a single sensitive photo, a screenshot or Signal is quick. When you receive a folder of fifty files from a source, a batch tool saves time and removes the chance of skipping one.

Smol removes stored tags. It is the wrong tool whenever the risk is in something the file also carries.

• The picture itself gives away the place. A street sign, a skyline or a shadow can locate a scene with no metadata at all. Crop, blur or choose a different frame; see the geolocation research.
• You need redaction. Smol does not redact PDFs or hide faces. Use a redaction tool and flatten the result.
• You are handling untrusted or possibly hostile documents. A sandbox such as Dangerzone converts documents in an isolated environment. Smol does not sandbox a file.
• The file is video. In our compression test Smol’s video compress kept the embedded tags. Use a different tool and verify.
• The file is a Word document or similar. Revision history and hidden text are in the format itself. OpenNews suggests, where it is feasible, pasting the text into a plain-text file.
• You need Windows or Linux. Smol is macOS only.
• You need a guarantee. We cannot promise that a file is clean. Check the output, and talk to your security lead.

Do I need a team license?

Solo is $29 once for one Mac. A desk of three can use Team, $49 once for three Macs. Larger newsrooms can buy Enterprise at $20 a seat, once, for 5 to 500 seats. Presets live on each Mac, so write your settings down and recreate them on every machine.