+++
date = 2022-02-17
title = "Stripping Image Metadata with Exiftool"
description = ""
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.cleberg.net`).

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/
```

The output of the command will let you know how many directories were scanned,
how many images were updated, and how many images were unchanged.