Do Mac screenshots contain metadata?

Yes, and much less than you think. There is no GPS in a screenshot and no camera data, because no camera took it. What there is amounts to dimensions, colour profile and resolution. The more useful thing to know is that "metadata" on a Mac is three different layers with three different behaviours, and the tools everyone recommends for checking it show you the layer that never leaves your machine.

The three layers

Layer one: what is actually in the file

I inspected a PNG produced on macOS 26.5.2 rather than describing this from memory. What the file carries is pixel width and height, eight bits per sample across four samples, an alpha channel, a resolution of 144 dots per inch in both directions, and a Display P3 colour profile. That is close to the whole list.

Compare that with a photo from a phone, which typically carries the make and model of the device, the lens, the exposure settings, the exact moment of capture, an orientation flag and, unless it has been disabled, latitude and longitude. None of that applies to a screenshot, because every one of those fields describes a physical act of photography that did not happen.

Why the boring fields are the disclosive ones

Two of those values say more than they look like they do.

The resolution field discloses your display scale. A standard capture reports 72 dots per inch; the file I looked at reports 144, which is the signature of a 2x Retina capture. So the header quietly says "this came off a high-density Apple display".

The colour profile narrows the hardware further. Display P3 is a wide gamut profile used by modern Apple displays, so its presence tells a reader roughly what class of machine produced the image. Neither field identifies you. Both are more than the nothing people assume is in there, and if you are trying to share something genuinely unattributable, they are the fields to think about.

Layer two: extended attributes

macOS can attach data to a file without putting it inside the file. These are extended attributes, and they are where things like the quarantine flag and the record of where a download came from live.

They are real and they are situational. The PNG I created locally had none at all. A file in the Downloads folder on the same machine carried several, including a last-used timestamp. Whether they survive depends entirely on how the file moves: a zip archive or AirDrop can preserve them, while most web uploads and chat apps strip them along with everything else that is not image data.

You can see them with xattr -l yourfile.png and clear them with xattr -c yourfile.png.

Layer three: the one that is not in the file

This is the part that makes most advice on this topic misleading. When you open Get Info, or run mdls, macOS shows you a long list of attributes: pixel count, colour space, content creation date, profile name. It reads like the file's metadata. It is not. Those values come from Spotlight's index, which is a database your Mac keeps about your files, not something stored inside them.

The giveaway is a field called kMDItemContentCreationDate_Ranking, which appears in that output and is obviously a search-ranking artifact. No PNG contains a search-ranking field. It exists because Spotlight put it there, on your disk, about your copy of the file.

So the practical consequence: checking a screenshot with Get Info shows you things that will not travel, and hides the layer that will. If you want to know what you are actually sending, read the file.

How to check properly

One command reads what is genuinely embedded:

sips -g all yourfile.png

That prints the real list: dimensions, format, dpi, samples, alpha, colour space and profile. Anything not in that output is not in the file. To see the separate layer macOS attached alongside it, use xattr -l yourfile.png. Between those two you have the complete picture of what leaves your machine.

What this anxiety distracts from

Metadata is the small half of the problem and it gets most of the attention, probably because it feels hidden and technical. The large half is sitting in plain sight.

A screenshot of your dashboard carries the customer's name in the table. A screenshot of your terminal carries the API key. A screenshot of your inbox carries every subject line above the one you meant to show. None of that is metadata; it is the picture, and no amount of header stripping touches it. Worse, the usual instinct of blurring or pixelating those regions can be reversible depending on how it is done, which is a separate trap covered in can you reverse a blurred or pixelated image?

If you are about to share a screenshot with anything sensitive in it, the thing worth doing properly is the pixels: how to redact a screenshot on a Mac. For whether a given screenshot is safe to send at all, see is it safe to share screenshots?

What ScrubShot's exports carry

Since I make a screenshot app, the honest specifics. ScrubShot does not have a metadata removal feature and I am not going to pretend it does. What it has is a save path that encodes a new PNG from the image in memory, with no metadata dictionary attached, and the image it encodes came from a live screen capture rather than from an existing file. There is no source metadata to carry forward, so none is carried forward.

That is a consequence of the design rather than a privacy feature, and the distinction matters: if you opened someone else's photograph in some other editor and exported it, you would need to check what that tool did with the original headers. Here there were never any.

What ScrubShot is actually built for is the other half, the one that matters more. Its scrub tool pixelates with a mosaic where each block averages four randomly sampled pixels, so the output does not depend on the layout of what was underneath and cannot be reconstructed from it. That is the part I would want you to judge it on.

About this guide

The metadata figures come from inspecting a real PNG on macOS 26.5.2 with the commands given above, and the extended-attribute comparison from checking a locally created file against a downloaded one on the same machine, rather than from other write-ups. Values on your own files will differ; the point is the method. The ScrubShot behaviour is described from its own export code, and stated as a consequence rather than a feature.

FAQ

Do Mac screenshots contain metadata?

Yes, but very little, and none of the kind people usually fear. A Mac screenshot is a PNG holding its dimensions, bit depth, whether it has an alpha channel, its resolution in dots per inch and a colour profile. There is no GPS, no camera model, no lens or exposure data, because no camera was involved. The larger disclosure in a screenshot is almost always what is visible in the image itself.

Do screenshots have GPS location data?

No. GPS coordinates get into a photo because a phone or camera with a location sensor writes them at the moment of capture. A screenshot is generated from what is already on your display, so there is no location to record and macOS does not invent one. If you are worried about location, worry about what is on screen: a map centred on your house discloses far more than any header would.

How do I check what metadata a screenshot has?

Use a tool that reads the file rather than one that reads what macOS knows about the file. In Terminal, sips -g all yourfile.png prints what is genuinely embedded. Get Info and the mdls command show Spotlight attributes, which live in your Mac's search index rather than inside the image, so they will show you fields that are not there and will not travel with the file when you send it.

How do I remove metadata from a screenshot on a Mac?

For most screenshots there is nothing meaningful to remove. If you want to be thorough, opening the image and re-exporting it from Preview writes a fresh file, and xattr -c yourfile.png clears any extended attributes macOS attached to it. Neither touches the pixels, which is where a screenshot's real disclosure lives.

Does sending a screenshot reveal what Mac I use?

Loosely, yes. The resolution field discloses whether it came from a Retina display, since a 2x capture reports 144 dots per inch rather than 72, and the embedded colour profile narrows down the display, for example Display P3 on modern Apple hardware. That is a long way from identifying you, but it is not nothing, and it is the one genuinely disclosive thing in a screenshot's headers.