Rinse · ExifCleaner alternatives
An honest comparison of ExifCleaner, exiftool and our own $9 tool, written by the people who make the paid one. Including the part where we tell you to keep the free one.
Written 2026-09-07. Everything we tested is dated and named below.
The short answer
ExifCleaner is free, open source, cross-platform and good at what it does. If it works for you, the correct move is to keep using it.
We sell a $9 alternative, so you should read the rest of this page knowing that. What we are not going to do is invent faults in a free tool in order to sell you ours. There are three sensible ways to strip metadata from images on a Mac, they differ in ways that are easy to state plainly, and for a lot of people the right answer is one of the two that cost nothing.
That last difference is the whole reason anyone would pay us. If it does not matter to you, you have your answer already and it is free.
If you landed here because a platform put an AI label on your work, the background is in why your photo says "Made with AI", and the Instagram-specific version is Instagram put an AI label on your real photo. This page is only about which tool to use.
Credit where it is due
ExifCleaner is a free, open source desktop app for removing metadata from images. You open it, drag files in, and it strips them. It is built with Electron, which is exactly why the same app exists for Windows and Linux as well as the Mac, and it is built on exiftool underneath, which is the most complete metadata implementation anybody has written.
Four things follow from that, and they are all genuine advantages over what we sell:
We keep a competitor file on it internally, and the note at the top of it says "don't trash them, they're the free baseline". This page is that note, in public.
Side by side
Every row below is something we can state without guessing. Where we have not run the test ourselves, the table says so rather than filling the gap with an assumption that happens to flatter us.
| exiftool | ExifCleaner | Rinse | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free | $9 once, one Mac |
| Source | Open | Open | Closed |
| Runs on | macOS, Windows, Linux | macOS, Windows, Linux | macOS 13 or later, only |
| Interface | A command line | A window you drag files into | A folder on your Desktop. No window at all |
| Per batch | Type or recall a command | Open the app, drag the batch | Nothing. It is already watching the folder |
| Your original | Kept beside the file unless you pass -overwrite_original |
Not tested by us | Copied to ~/Rinse/originals/, timestamped, always |
| Pixels | Untouched | Not tested by us | Re-encoded at quality 0.92, so not bit-exact |
| Tells you when it is done | Shell output | Not tested by us | A macOS notification with the number of tags removed |
| Signed by Apple | n/a | Not tested by us | Not yet. See below |
"Not tested by us" means exactly that. We have a bench for testing our own build and we have not pointed it at somebody else's app, so we are not going to report a result we do not have.
C2PA Content Credentials are the newer thing people want removed, and "the paid tool handles C2PA and the free one does not" is a tempting line for us to write. We are not writing it, because we have not tested ExifCleaner and therefore do not know.
Here is what we do know, from our own bench on 2026-09-04. We built a JPEG carrying a
C2PA-shaped JUMBF box in an APP11 marker, confirmed that exiftool 13.55
parses it as such, and then ran two routes over it. Rinse removed it,
confirmed by raw byte scan of the output. Plain exiftool -all=
also removed it, on the same fixture, leaving zero occurrences of
APP11, jumb or c2pa. Both routes worked. Since
ExifCleaner is built on exiftool, you can draw your own inference, and you can also
just test it, in about a minute, with the commands in the next section.
Full detail on what a Content Credential is, where it hides and how to remove it by hand is on how to remove C2PA Content Credentials.
Do not take anyone's word
This is the most useful thing on this page and it works on any metadata tool, including ours. Every claim in this category should be checkable by you, and this is how you check it.
# install exiftool (Homebrew), or get the package from exiftool.org
brew install exiftoolexiftool -G1 -s -a -JUMBF:all -XMP:all -IPTC:all -EXIF:all photo.jpgKeep that output. Everything in it is what the file is currently telling anyone who opens it: your camera, your editing software, often your GPS coordinates, sometimes a signed provenance record.
Whatever it is. ExifCleaner, Rinse, exiftool itself, one of the newer paid ones. Work on a copy, never your only version of a file.
# same read as step 1, on the cleaned file
exiftool -G1 -s -a -JUMBF:all -XMP:all -IPTC:all -EXIF:all cleaned.jpg
# and a raw byte scan, which does not depend on any parser
LC_ALL=C grep -a -c 'c2pa' cleaned.jpg
The grep prints 0 when the string is not present anywhere in
the file. The reason to run it as well as the exiftool read is that a tag query only
reports what the parser understands, and a byte scan reports what is actually there.
Swap c2pa for jumb, or for your own camera model, or for a
place name, and check those too.
Two failure modes make this worth doing on any tool. A container the tool does not fully parse leaves things behind. And an encoder can write a fresh tag straight back in after a clean pass. Reading the file afterwards is the only proof that counts, which is the same standard we hold ourselves to.
Be honest with yourself
Do not buy Rinse if any of these is you. We would rather not take the $9.
exiftool
-all= is muscle memory, you own the most capable tool in this space already
and Rinse is a convenience wrapper you do not need.
When the $9 one earns it
Rinse is a small Mac utility with no window. Installing it puts two folders on your Desktop, Clean and Cleaned. Drag a file or a whole export into Clean and a stripped copy appears in Cleaned, usually in about two seconds. You did not open anything. There is nothing to open.
Underneath, macOS itself watches that folder and starts the cleaner whenever something lands in it, so this holds across restarts and it does not sit in your menu bar. Everything runs on your Mac; there is no network call anywhere in it.
That is the entire pitch. A drag-and-drop app makes cleaning a task you have to remember before every delivery. A watched folder makes it a step in the pipeline that happens whether you remember or not, which for a studio delivering client work every week is a different thing to buy.
~/Rinse/originals/ with a timestamp on the front of the
name, before anything is done to it. You do not have to remember to make a copy.
Worth knowing up front, because it surprises people: the file you dropped in is
then removed from the drop folder. Nothing is lost, the untouched original is in
~/Rinse/originals/ and the cleaned version is in Cleaned,
but the folder you dropped into empties itself as it works. ExifCleaner leaves your
file exactly where it was.
Or read the full product page first.
Rinse re-encodes the pixels into a fresh container as its first pass, at quality 0.92. In normal use the result is visually identical to the original, same dimensions, same colour, and your original is always kept. It is not a byte-for-byte copy of the pixels, and we do not claim it is. If bit-exact pixels matter to you, exiftool leaves them completely untouched, so use exiftool.
Rinse is also not code-signed yet. Our Apple Developer enrolment was submitted in September 2026 and is being verified as of writing, so on macOS 15 Sequoia and later the first launch means dismissing a warning, then clicking "Open Anyway" in System Settings under Privacy & Security. Once, then never again. We would rather tell you now than at the moment you have just paid.
Where this stops
This applies to ExifCleaner, to exiftool, and to us equally. It is a property of metadata, not of anybody's product.
Platforms increasingly pair metadata reading with their own classifier-based detection, TikTok and Pinterest among them. Removing metadata removes the metadata trigger. It does nothing about a model looking at your image and forming a view. Whatever a platform's classifier decides is beyond the reach of any metadata tool, Rinse included, and nobody can promise you a label will not appear.
Google's SynthID and similar pixel-domain watermarks are woven into the image itself, not into its metadata. Rinse does not remove SynthID and cannot. Neither can exiftool, or any other metadata tool. Only diffusion-based regeneration can weaken a watermark like that, and even then never with certainty. If a page tells you otherwise, you can check it in five minutes and find out it is false.
Cleaning a file on your Mac has no effect on a copy a platform, a client or a service already holds. They are different files and nothing you run locally reaches theirs.
Rinse is not built for that and does not achieve it. It exists because photographers, agencies and studios keep getting real work flagged over fields that Adobe, a camera, or a retouching step wrote without asking. That is the problem it solves, and where it stops is written on the box.
Related questions
exiftool. It is free, open source, actively maintained, and it is the engine
underneath most graphical metadata cleaners including ExifCleaner and our own.
brew install exiftool, then exiftool -all= photo.jpg.
You get no interface and total control, which is the right trade for a lot of
people.
Only if it removes work rather than adding a purchase. The free tools do the removal perfectly well. What you are buying with a paid one is the workflow around it: in our case a watched folder so no one has to remember to clean before a delivery, automatic timestamped originals, and a count of what was removed on every file. If cleaning is occasional for you, that is not worth $9 and you should keep the free tool.
We have not tested it, so we are not going to tell you either way. We have tested
plain exiftool -all=, on 2026-09-04, against a JPEG carrying a
C2PA-shaped JUMBF box, and it removed it completely on a raw byte scan. ExifCleaner
is built on exiftool. Test your own case in a minute: read the file with
exiftool -G1 -s -a -JUMBF:all photo.jpg, clean it, read it again, and
then run LC_ALL=C grep -a -c 'c2pa' cleaned.jpg and expect
0.
No. ExifCleaner and exiftool are, and if that is a requirement for you it is a good reason to choose one of them over us. What we offer instead is that every claim we make is checkable from outside: read the file before, read it after, and the answer does not depend on trusting us.
No. Rinse is macOS 13 Ventura or later, Apple silicon or Intel. If you need Windows or Linux, ExifCleaner covers all three platforms and exiftool runs anywhere.
ExifCleaner is a window you open and drag a batch into, free, open source, on three platforms. Rinse is a folder on your Desktop that cleans anything dropped into it without being opened, keeps a timestamped copy of every original, and notifies you with a count of what it removed, for $9 on a Mac. If the manual step is not a burden for you, the free one is the better buy.
No, and it cannot. SynthID and similar watermarks live in the pixels, not in metadata. No metadata tool removes them, ours included. Anything claiming otherwise is claiming something you can disprove in an afternoon.
Not yet. Our Apple Developer enrolment was submitted in September 2026 and is being verified as of writing, so the first launch means dismissing a warning and clicking "Open Anyway" in System Settings under Privacy and Security. Once, then never again. We would rather say so on the comparison page than after you have paid.
$9. One Mac. Local only. 7-day refund, no questions.
JPEG, PNG, TIFF, HEIC, AVIF and static GIF.