ByEase Software

What your PDF and photos say about you — and how to strip it on a Mac

Author names, GPS coordinates and edit history travel inside the files you send. How to see what is in yours on macOS, and how to remove it before sharing.

Open a photo you took last week. Press ⌘I in Preview, then open the More Info tab. Somewhere in there is a latitude and a longitude, accurate to a few metres, recording exactly where you were standing.

Now open a PDF you exported from Word or InDesign and press ⌘I again. There is a good chance it names the author — often a full legal name — the software that made it, and the moment it was created.

None of this is a bug. It is metadata doing its job. It becomes a problem only at the moment you send the file to someone who was not supposed to have it.

What is actually in there

Photos (EXIF). Camera make and model, lens, exposure, the exact timestamp, and on any phone photo with location services on, GPS coordinates. On an iPhone that includes photos taken inside your home.

PDFs. Author, creator and producer fields, creation and modification dates, and sometimes the title from the original document — which may still be Offer_ClientB_v3_final_REALFINAL when you sent it to Client A.

Office documents exported to PDF. Depending on how they were exported, tracked changes and comments can survive into the PDF. This one has ended careers.

Why it matters more than it sounds

Three ordinary situations:

  • You list something on a marketplace and photograph it at home. The listing photos carry your home coordinates.
  • You send a proposal to a client. The PDF names a colleague who works on the competing account, and a filename that shows they got version three.
  • You publish an anonymous report. The producer field names your organisation’s licensed copy of the software.

How to check what is in a file

For a quick look, Preview’s Inspector (⌘I) is enough for both images and PDFs.

From the terminal, for images:

mdls -name kMDItemLatitude -name kMDItemLongitude photo.jpg

If that returns coordinates instead of (null), the location is in the file.

For PDFs, Preview’s Inspector shows the document properties directly. Note that macOS has no built-in command that strips metadata — mdls and the Inspector only read it.

Removing it

Photos, single file, no tools. Open the image in Preview, then Tools → Show Inspector → the (i) tab → GPS → Remove Location Info. This removes the location and leaves the rest of the EXIF in place. It is one file at a time.

Photos, via the Photos app. When sharing from Photos, tap Options and turn off Location. This only affects that share — the library copy keeps its coordinates.

A screenshot as a last resort. Screenshotting a document does drop the metadata, along with the text layer, the resolution and any chance of it looking professional. It works, and it is a blunt instrument.

PDFs. There is no built-in route at all. Preview will show you the author field; it will not let you clear it. The common workarounds — re-printing to PDF, or flattening the document — usually replace one set of metadata with another rather than removing it.

Doing it deliberately, in batch

This is the gap ByEase File Tools was built for. Its Metadata Cleaner takes a folder of PDFs or images and strips author history, GPS coordinates and technical tags in one pass, from the Finder right-click menu.

The part that matters for this particular job: it runs entirely on your Mac. Uploading a document to a website in order to remove the identifying data from it is a strange trade, and the free online metadata removers are exactly that trade. There is no server in this app to send anything to.

A habit worth building

Strip metadata at the point of sending, not at the point of creating. You want the GPS data in your own library — it is what makes Photos’ map view work. What you do not want is that data leaving with a file. Make it the last step before the attachment, the same way you check the recipient.