Most people think a screenshot is just pixels. It isn’t. A screenshot file carries metadata that can reveal your device, your operating system, and sometimes when and where you took the shot. Before you share a capture with someone outside your team, it’s worth knowing what travels with it and how to remove it.

What actually lives in a PNG screenshot

A standard macOS screenshot is saved as PNG. Unlike a photo from a camera, it has no EXIF block, so there is no GPS location, no lens data, and no ISO to worry about. That’s good news. But “no EXIF” doesn’t mean “no information.”

Field Present in a macOS PNG? What it reveals
GPS / geolocation No Nothing. Screenshots don’t embed location
Camera / device model No Not written by the OS for screen captures
Capture timestamp No macOS doesn’t write a time field into the image data
Color profile Yes sRGB or Display P3; harmless, but identifies a modern Mac display pipeline
Image dimensions Yes Screen resolution of the captured area; can hint at display size
File name Yes The real tell, see below

The file name is the biggest leak

macOS names built-in screenshots like this:

Screenshot 2026-09-28 at 14.32.07.png

That string encodes the date and exact time you took the capture. If you share the file (not just a link), the recipient gets that timestamp for free. A few practical consequences:

  • It confirms when an event happened, which can matter in disputes or support tickets.
  • On a machine shared with others, it tells them roughly when you were using it.
  • Batching screenshots from a session produces a cluster of timestamps that map your activity.

Shotivo writes its own prefix but the same timestamp convention, so local saves look like Shotivo 2026-09-28 at 14.32.07.png in ~/Pictures/Shotivo/. The date and time travel with the file either way, so the same caveat applies to anything you drag out of that folder.

What “sharing” does to the metadata

When you upload a screenshot to a sharing service, two things happen to the metadata:

  1. The bytes are usually kept as-is. Most hosts store the image exactly as uploaded and don’t strip internal fields. The color profile and dimensions travel along.
  2. The file name is dropped. The share page serves the image under a random ID (shotivo.app/s/…), not your original Screenshot … at … name. So the timestamp leak from the file name disappears the moment you use a link instead of attaching the raw file.

This is one quiet advantage of sharing by link rather than by attachment: the recipient sees the pixels, not your file name. The wider picture is in the screenshot privacy guide, including how unlisted links and expiration work.

How to strip what’s left

For the rare case where you need a scrubbed file (for example, attaching it somewhere that preserves names or metadata):

  • Re-export through Preview. Open the PNG in Preview and choose File → Export. Choosing a different format rewrites the file, which drops the incidental fields along with it.
  • Save under a neutral name. The timestamp is in the file name, not the image data, so renaming on export is enough to remove it. Export from Preview and give it a name like screenshot.png.
  • Blur, then crop. If the concern is on-screen content rather than file metadata, do the blur and crop in your annotation editor before you export. Removing visible text and tokens matters far more than any embedded field.

For day-to-day sharing, none of this is usually necessary: there’s no GPS or EXIF to leak, and a share link already hides the file name. The habit that pays off is simply not attaching raw screenshot files when a link will do.

A quick checklist before you share

  1. Prefer a link over an attachment so the OS file name (and its timestamp) never travels with the image.
  2. Remember there’s no location data in a macOS screenshot, so you don’t need to scrub GPS.
  3. Blur on-screen secrets first, in the editor, before any export or upload.
  4. Crop to the minimum context; smaller frames carry less incidental detail.
  5. If you must attach the raw file, re-export it through Preview and give it a neutral name.

The metadata in a Mac screenshot is modest compared to a camera photo, but the file name is the part worth hiding. Sharing by link instead of attaching the raw file takes care of it for you.