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+date = 2022-02-17
+title = "Stripping Image Metadata with exiftool"
+description = "Become a h@ck3r (i.e., just protect your privacy) by using the exiftool command line package to strip metadata from images."
+draft = false
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+
+## Why Strip Metadata?
+
+Okay, so you want to strip metadata from your photos. Perhaps you take pictures
+of very rare birds, and the location metadata is a gold mine for poachers, or
+perhaps you're just privacy-oriented like me and prefer to strip metadata from
+publicly-available images.
+
+There are various components of image metadata that you may want to delete
+before releasing a photo to the public. Here's an incomplete list of things I
+could easily see just by inspecting a photo on my laptop:
+
+-   Location (Latitude & Longitude)
+-   Dimensions
+-   Device Make & Model
+-   Color Space
+-   Color Profile
+-   Focal Length
+-   Alpha Channel
+-   Red Eye
+-   Metering Mode
+-   F Number
+
+Regardless of your reasoning, I'm going to explain how I used the `exiftool`
+package in Linux to automatically strip metadata from all images in a directory
+(+ subdirectories).
+
+## Installing `exiftool`
+
+First things first: we need to install the tool. I'm running Debian 11 on my
+server (Ubuntu will work the same), so the command is as simple as:
+
+```sh
+sudo apt install exiftool
+```
+
+There are different tools that can accomplish the same thing across
+distributions, but I really only care to test out this one package.
+
+## Recursively Strip Data
+
+I actually use this tool extensively to strip any photos uploaded to the website
+that serves all the images for my blog (`img.0x4b1d.org`).
+
+The following command is incredibly useful and can be modified to include any
+image extensions that `exiftool` supports:
+
+```sh
+exiftool -r -all= -ext jpg -ext png /path/to/directory/
+```
+
+See below for the results of my most recent usage of `exiftool` after I uploaded
+the image for this blog post. You can see that the command will let you know how
+many directories were scanned, how many images were updated, and how many images
+were unchanged.
+
+![exiftool results](https://img.0x4b1d.org/blog/20220217-stripping-metadata-with-exiftool/exiftool.png)