Nothing Personal for Mac
The same inspector, in Finder, on folders — plus the metadata macOS keeps outside the image file, which no browser can reach. $19, once, no subscription.
The two things the browser cannot do
Download history
macOS attaches extended attributes to files on disk. One of them,kMDItemWhereFroms, records the URL a file was downloaded from. It is not part of the image, so stripping every EXIF tag leaves it intact, and it travels with the file when you copy it. No web page can see it, because no web page can see your filesystem. The app finds it and removes it.
Volume
A browser can only touch files you hand it individually. The app takes folders, works through them, and can watch a folder so anything landing in it is cleaned without you opening anything.
In Finder, without opening the app
Right-click any photo, choose Remove Metadata, and the Quick Action does it in place. For the most common case — one photo, about to be posted — that is the entire interaction.
It tells you when it fails
After writing a stripped file, the app reads it back and checks what survived. If anything identifying is still in there, it refuses to report the file as clean, names what remained, and leaves the original untouched.
Reporting a file clean when it isn't would be a lie. That is worth almost nothing to someone stripping a holiday photo, and it is the entire product for anyone who has to prove metadata was removed.
What it does not do
- No accounts, no sync, no telemetry, no subscription
- No uploads, ever — it does not have networking code
- Not documents or video. Images only
Questions
- What does the Mac app do that the free browser tool does not?
- Two things. It reads and removes the extended attributes macOS attaches to files — including the URL a file was downloaded from — which are stored outside the image and are unreadable from any browser. And it works on folders rather than on files you hand it one at a time, from a Finder right-click.
- Does the Mac app upload anything?
- No. It does the work locally, the same as the browser tool. It has no account, no sync and no telemetry.
- What happens if it cannot remove the metadata?
- It tells you and leaves the file alone. After writing a stripped copy it re-reads it and checks what survived; if anything identifying is still there, it reports the failure rather than presenting the file as clean. That behaviour is the reason the app exists rather than a smaller feature of it.
- Which formats does it handle?
- JPEG, PNG, HEIC, WebP, TIFF and GIF — including HEIC, which the browser tool reads but will not rewrite. It uses the container-editing path wherever one exists and says so explicitly on the occasions it has to re-encode.
Get it
The Mac app is not on sale yet. The browser tool is free and does everything above except folders and extended attributes — use that meanwhile, and leave your address under a result if you want to know when the app ships.