How to remove “Where from” from a file on Mac
macOS records where a downloaded file came from, and Get Info shows it under More Info › Where from: the download address and the page it came from, such as a chat on chatgpt.com or claude.ai. It stays with the file when you zip it or copy it to a drive. To remove it, right-click the file in Finder and choose FileMate › Remove Metadata: a clean copy without Where from is saved next to it. In Terminal, xattr -d com.apple.metadata:kMDItemWhereFroms removes it from the file itself.
The clean copy is made on your Mac. Nothing is uploaded.
Remove Where from with FileMate
- Right-click the downloaded file in Finder, or several files at once.
- Choose FileMate › Remove Metadata.
- A clean copy is saved next to it, such as Launch plan cleaned.docx, and its Get Info has no Where from. The original isn’t changed.
Remove Metadata also removes the location, dates, camera details and names written inside photos, PDFs, Office documents, audio and video. Choose what it removes in FileMate Settings › Remove Metadata.
Where “Where from” comes from
When you download a file in Safari or another browser, or save an attachment from Mail, macOS stores where it came from in an extended attribute named com.apple.metadata:kMDItemWhereFroms. Get Info lists it under More Info: usually the file’s own download address and the page you were on. For a document made by an AI assistant, that page can be the conversation itself, such as https://chatgpt.com/c/… or https://claude.ai/chat/….
It isn’t part of the document’s text, so it doesn’t show when the file is opened. It stays beside the file, though, and goes with it into a ZIP archive made with Finder’s Compress, onto an external drive and into some cloud folders.
Get Info shows Where from, but doesn’t let you edit it.
Remove it with Terminal
macOS’s xattr command removes an extended attribute from a file:
xattr -d com.apple.metadata:kMDItemWhereFroms "Launch plan.docx"xattr -l "Launch plan.docx" lists a file’s extended attributes first. This changes the original, one file at a time, and leaves the rest: the download date (com.apple.metadata:kMDItemDownloadedDate), Finder tags, and the author, dates and other properties written inside the document.
What Remove Metadata removes
Everything below is removed until you turn something off in FileMate Settings › Remove Metadata:
| Setting | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Location | GPS coordinates and place names |
| Dates and times | When a photo was taken, or a document or recording made or edited |
| Camera, device and software | Camera and lens models, serial numbers, the app that made the file |
| Names, copyright and descriptions | Author, last edited by, copyright, titles, comments, keywords |
| Where From | Get Info’s Where from, and the download date |
| Finder tags and comments | Tags, Finder comments, when it was last opened |
Inside the file, it works on photos, PDFs, Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents, audio and video. For other files, such as a ZIP archive, FileMate can’t read inside, so it removes Where From and the Finder information only, and the result says so.
Does it change the original file?
No. Remove Metadata saves a clean copy next to each file, named with “cleaned”, and leaves the original as it was. A file with nothing to remove gets no copy: the result says no metadata was found.
Does it remove everything that shows where a file came from?
It removes the metadata above. What the file itself says, its text, images and wording, stays as it is.
Get FileMate
Where from is one line in Get Info, but it says where a file has been: the chat that produced it, the site you got it from. Remove it before you pass the file on, and keep the original as it was.
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