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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.
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