#+date: <2022-02-17 Thu 00:00:00>
#+title: Effortlessly Remove Image Metadata Using Exiftool
#+description: Learn how to quickly and securely strip metadata from photos with Exiftool to protect privacy and optimize image files. Step-by-step guide included.
#+slug: exiftool
#+filetags: :exiftool:metadata:image-processing:

** 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:

#+begin_src sh
sudo apt install exiftool
#+end_src

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:

#+begin_src sh
exiftool -r -all= -ext jpg -ext png /path/to/directory/
#+end_src

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.