How to best remove all EXIF metadata from pic's & Documents using the CLI

Joined
Mar 26, 2021
Messages
81
Reaction score
41
Credits
863
How to best remove all EXIF metadata from pic's & Documents using the CLI, i see lots online about it, loads of different ways but i was hoping that the CLI can strip everything with needing to download a third party tool from somewhere?
If downloading a tool is the only way then which tool does the best job which is OpenSource code hence trusted?

I did search on this platform for any related topics and couldn't find anything already.
 


If memory serves, there is a tool in libimage called exiftool, install the package libimage-exiftool-perl, then you can remove exif data from a single file like this:
Bash:
exiftool -all= /path/to/image.jpg

Or you could use globbing:
Bash:
exiftool -all= *
That would allow you to remove exit data from all supported image files in the current directory.

From what I remember, the -all option allows you to set which bits of metadata to keep in the files. So using -all= without specifying any fields basically means "don’t keep any exif metadata", or "delete all exif metadata".
 
Last edited:
This is my exif-cleaning alias:

Code:
alias picclean="exiftool -overwrite_original -all= *.png ; exiftool -overwrite_original -all= *.jpg ; echo $PWD 'images cleaned for privacy sake!'"

Which I should probably just change to the asterisk method in the above post.
 
Moving this to Command Line.

Cheers

Wizard
 
How to best remove all EXIF metadata from pic's & Documents using the CLI, i see lots online about it, loads of different ways but i was hoping that the CLI can strip everything with needing to download a third party tool from somewhere?
If downloading a tool is the only way then which tool does the best job which is OpenSource code hence trusted?

I did search on this platform for any related topics and couldn't find anything already.
You can have a look here - https://github.com/hvdwolf/jExifToolGUI/releases
There is an AppImage available for download - this is a GUI frontend for the exiftool which you can can get through the Synaptic Package Manager - libimage-exiftool-perl for Buntu based OS, once this file is installed you can then run the AppImage
 
Last edited by a moderator:

Members online


Top