General metadata erasing

@LeBalladeer - totally agreed.

As Ghandi said, "speak only if you can improve upon the silence."

It's kind of amazing to me that posters here preferred to tell the OP he shouldn't want to do that, instead of trying to help solve his problem. His reasons are irrelevant and he asked a simple question. As an attorney, it is standard operating procedure at my firm and all others (and has been for years) to strip metadata out of all attachments sent to anyone outside the firm. The reasons are many, and include privacy and client confidentiality, breaches of which, due to un-redacted metadata, have caused embarrassing and material setbacks in underlying lawsuits and negotiations, as well as successful malpractice lawsuits arising as a result. Again, it's irrelevant why the OP wants to remove metadata. Just help him or ignore the question.

<Edited by Host>

There's a lot of different kinds of metadata on a Mac.

I'm not sure why you'd want to get rid of creation dates, but if you're familiar with UNIX and Terminal, you can change them with the touch command. But I'd strongly recommend against doing that until you know the consequences. For example, changing Modified Dates can cause all sorts of problems with backups, and any process that uses them to determine what needs to be processed, which version of something is the most current, etc. Offhand, I don't know what OSX does with creation dates.

I'd be far more worried about my data being compromised than dates or other metadata on files.

If that's your real concern, you might want to encrypt your HD. See OS X Mountain Lion: Encrypt the information on your disk with FileVault.

Message was edited by: Pondini

YEFAYEFA wrote:

No no, it's not creation,

That's what you posted: What I need to delete are creation dates, etc.

If "Amy Wartson" edits a document on "August 3rd", that's a non-relevant information to me, which I want to get rid of.

You can't get rid of the date fields (created, added, modified, last opened). You can reset them, to zero if you want, via touch.

If you use the Finder in List View, you can remove them from the display, via Finder > View > Show VIew Options.

I found this tool, which I have not been able to test yet - do you think I would be able to do what I need with it?

Looks like that works on extended attributes, another type of metadata. I don't know where/how the camera information is stored -- if it's an extended attribute, then it looks like it.

Forgive me, but I really don't understand the concern here. Unless your system is compromised, nobody else will see it. It doesn't take up much space, either.

Also forgive me, but while there are many similarities with Windows, there are fundamental differences, too, some of it what might be called philosophical. For better or worse, Steve and Woz thought things should be different, so there are limits on what you can do.

If you're fairly new to OSX, you might want to see the PC to Mac tutorial, and/or some of the others on that page.

YEFAYEFA wrote:

I might just be extremely lost, but in Windows I right click a file, go to "details" and there I can see all extended information to which I'm referring. Simple examples:

Power Point file: Title, Subject, Author, Saved by...

Video file: Camera, camera model, exposure...

And you can do the same on the Mac. Only it is called "Get Info" in the Finder. It doesn't have as much metadata because Apple has not traditionally had a major office package with deep integration into the OS like Windows has. iWork has space for such metadata, but doesn't appear to fill it in at all, nor display it in the Finder.

This information will show up for pictures and video.

All of this I find irrelevant and I want removed.

Irrelevant? Then just click on the disclosure triangle and it will go away. You are not going to save one byte of disk space, if that's what you are thinking.

In Windows, there's a big button within the "details" screen that says "remove properties and personal information".

Nobody ever said you didn't get anything from all the Windows bloat. I suppose you could submit feedback to Apple and ask for such a feature. It doesn't sound any worse than Apple Mail's "remove attachments" feature. I don't know why you want to remove this information though. There isn't much risk with modern privacy paranoia.

This leaves my files just the way I want them, and works with all files format which actually store extended information (a ZIP files stores nothing but the size, etc).

A ZIP file would include any metadata that was originally in the file, only safely out of view. It is certainly still there.

There may be resources in OnyX that will do what you want, such as possibly "Apple Double" under the Utilities tab. DS_Store files can also be removed in the automation script. I have not used these utilities and do not know their outcome.

However, as Linc Davis says, there are good reasons for having metadata, for Spotlight indexing and in iPhoto, Faces and Places data etc.

http://www.titanium.free.fr

You will need to ask this of somebody more knowledgeable than I, about DS_Store files...😕

A Google search shows a lot of ways to remove this data from photos

eg.

https://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/12759/smallimage

You may find more specific information on Stack Exchange. But beware unintended consequences as Pondini points out.

http://chat.stackexchange.com

eg.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4833052/how-do-i-remove-the-extended-attribut es-on-a-file-in-mac-osx

Cool. Just be sure not to delete or change anything you're not sure of -- some apps use extended attributes on files or folders to make various things happen (or not happen, or happen differently).

You could end up in a major pickle. 😉

Your question has nothing to do with Apple's products. Each file format stores metadata in a different fashion. It is a question for each application to preserve and/or remove it. The Finder DS Store files and extended attributes do not contain the information you want to remove. Everyone is privacy conscious these days. If you share data with Mail, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc. such metadata will be stripped out. When in doubt, share something with metadata to test it and see for yourself. I'm sure there are plenty of application that will remove metadata, but you will have to track them down.