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diff --git a/blog/2022-02-17-exiftool.org b/blog/2022-02-17-exiftool.org new file mode 100644 index 0000000..f9a42bc --- /dev/null +++ b/blog/2022-02-17-exiftool.org @@ -0,0 +1,63 @@ ++++ +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 ++++ + +## 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. + + |