What Finder's Get Info shows, and what it hides

Get Info (select a file, press Command-I) shows the file’s kind, size, dates, Finder tags and comments, permissions, and a More Info section assembled from Spotlight’s index: dimensions and camera model for a photo, duration and codecs for a video, a download URL for something saved from the web. It does not show GPS coordinates in most cases, tracked changes or comments in a Word file, the author or producer of a PDF, or the hundreds of EXIF fields beyond the handful Spotlight picks out. For those you need Preview’s Inspector, the app that made the file, or mdls in Terminal.

The sections of the Get Info panel

Open Get Info on any file and you get the same set of collapsible sections.

• Header. Icon, name, size, and modified date. Click the icon and you can paste a new one; this is cosmetic and lives in an extended attribute.
• Tags. Finder tags. Stored beside the file as an extended attribute, not inside it.
• General. Kind, size (with both the byte count and the space on disk), Where (the folder path), Created and Modified dates, and checkboxes for Stationery pad and Locked.
• More Info. The section that varies by file type; covered in detail below.
• Name & Extension. The full filename and a checkbox to hide the extension.
• Comments. A free-text Finder comment. Extended attribute, not part of the file.
• Open with. The default app for this file.
• Preview. A thumbnail.
• Sharing & Permissions. Which users and groups can read or write the file.

Everything in Tags, Comments, and the custom icon belongs to your Mac’s filesystem. It does not travel inside the file when you email or upload it. It can travel with AirDrop and inside a zip made in Finder, which stores extended attributes in a __MACOSX folder.

What More Info shows, by file type

More Info is built from the Spotlight attributes the file’s importer extracted. It is a summary, and what it includes depends on the importer.

Photos. Dimensions, color space, color profile, and often the camera make and model, focal length, f-number, exposure time, ISO, and whether the flash fired. In other words, enough to tell which phone took the picture. Latitude and longitude are indexed by Spotlight for many images but are not usually displayed in this panel.

Videos. Duration, dimensions, codecs, total bit rate, and sometimes the audio channel layout. Not the location or the device that recorded it, even when the file contains both.

Audio. Title, artist, album, genre, year, duration, sample rate, bit rate, and sometimes the encoder.

Documents. Title and sometimes Authors for Word documents and PDFs, page count, and for some formats the content creator application. Not the last person who saved it, the revision number, the editing time, or the existence of tracked changes.

Downloads. A “Where from” line listing the URL the file was fetched from, and for files received through Mail or Messages, sometimes the sender’s address or the conversation it arrived in. This is kMDItemWhereFroms, an extended attribute, and it is one of the more revealing things on a Mac that most people have never noticed.

What Get Info does not show

The gaps matter more than the contents, because they are where people assume a file is clean when it is not.

• GPS coordinates in photos and videos. A photo can have a full location block and show nothing about it in Get Info. Preview’s Inspector (Command-I inside Preview) shows a GPS tab with a map when coordinates are present.
• The full EXIF block. A camera writes dozens to hundreds of fields: lens serial number on some cameras, the software version, the original capture time versus the file date, an embedded thumbnail that may predate a crop. Get Info shows a handful.
• Word document internals. Tracked changes, comments, the last-saved-by name, revision count, total editing time, template path, company name. Word’s File > Properties shows most of those; the post on track-changes-and-comments-can-leak-cleaning-a-docx-before-you-send-it.html covers the rest.
• PDF properties. Author, Subject, Keywords, Creator, and Producer. Preview’s Inspector shows these on its General tab.
• Embedded images inside documents. A DOCX or PDF with a pasted phone photo carries that photo’s EXIF, and no Finder panel reaches that deep.
• Audio tag oddities. Comment fields, purchaser information in store-bought tracks, bext chunks in WAV files.

In short, Get Info tells you about the file as a file. It says less about what the file says about you.

Where to look instead

Each gap has a better tool, and all of them ship with macOS except the last.

1. Preview’s Inspector for photos and PDFs: open the file, press Command-I, and read the EXIF, GPS, and General tabs. This is the fastest way to answer “does this photo have a location.”
2. The app that made the file for documents: Word’s File > Properties, and Review > Tracking set to All Markup to reveal tracked changes.
3. mdls in Terminal for everything Spotlight indexed, including attributes More Info leaves out. Type mdls, drag the file into the Terminal window, press Return. Scan for kMDItemLatitude, kMDItemWhereFroms, kMDItemAuthors, and kMDItemAcquisitionModel.
4. ffprobe (part of ffmpeg, if installed) for the complete metadata block of a video or audio file.

The post on how-to-check-a-file-s-metadata-on-a-mac.html walks through each of these with examples.

Cleaning what Get Info cannot see

Finding a location in a photo or a name in a document is the first half. Removing it is the second.

Preview removes GPS from one photo at a time (Inspector, GPS tab, Remove Location Info). Word’s Security preferences have a “Remove personal information from this file on save” option. For a folder of files, Manatee’s Clean mode strips GPS, camera EXIF, and document author and revision metadata from photos, PDFs, and Word documents in one pass, writing a cleaned copy beside each original without modifying the original. It runs entirely on the Mac with no uploads. It removes metadata only; it does not edit the picture or the text, and it is not an audio tag editor.

For the Finder-side attributes (tags, comments, the download URL), the fix is different: they are not in the file, so they do not go with it by email or upload. If you need them gone from a file you will AirDrop or zip, the xattr -c command in Terminal clears all extended attributes from a file; note that this also clears the quarantine flag and any custom icon.

Questions

Does Get Info show the GPS location of a photo?

Usually not, even when the photo has one. Spotlight may index the coordinates, but the More Info panel does not display them. Open the photo in Preview and press Command-I; a GPS tab means there is a location.

What is the “Where from” line, and does it get sent with the file?

It is the URL the file was downloaded from (or, for some attachments, the sender), stored as an extended attribute beside the file. It is not part of the file, so email and web uploads do not carry it. AirDrop and Finder-made zip archives can.

Why do Created and Modified in Get Info differ from the date in the photo’s EXIF?

Get Info shows filesystem dates: when the file was written to this disk and last changed. EXIF shows when the camera took the picture. Copying a file or editing it changes the first; only the camera, or an editor that rewrites EXIF, changes the second.

Can I edit metadata in Get Info?

Only the Finder-side parts: the name, tags, comments, icon, default app, and permissions. Nothing inside the file (EXIF, document properties, PDF fields) can be changed from this panel.