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I'm looking for a way to get rid of ALL metadata associated with an image. What should I do?

user3333975
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3 Answers3

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A big-hammer approach is jhead's -purejpg option, which, according to the documentation:

Deletes all JPEG sections that aren’t necessary for rendering the image. Strips any metadata that various applications may have left in the image.

This is a cross-platform (Mac, Linux, Windows) command-line program. For example, if you want to remove metadata from a file named "image.jpg" in the current directory, you would run

jhead -purejpg image.jpg

and that is all there is to it.

mattdm
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  • Define "big-hammer", please. I vote for mattdm so far, namely because of your other accounts. – user3333975 Mar 05 '14 at 22:43
  • Hey, mattdm, how do I install this in the terminal? – user3333975 Mar 05 '14 at 22:45
  • @user3333975 Depends on your operating system. On Fedora, sudo yum install jhead. On Ubuntu or Debian, sudo apt-get install jhead. On Mac or Windows, you download them from the web site above and put them in your $PATH. If you don't know how to do that, this becomes a question for http://superuser.com/ :) – mattdm Mar 05 '14 at 22:47
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    Big hammer: it's not very smart and doesn't give you any fine control,but it will definitely smash the metadata. – mattdm Mar 05 '14 at 22:48
  • I see... Well, never mind about the terminal; I've got it. – user3333975 Mar 05 '14 at 22:48
  • How would I implement it? I mean, perhaps for people visiting this page who want a quick answer you could provide a command line example for an image in the current directory called image.jpg, yeah? – user3333975 Mar 05 '14 at 22:50
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Exiftool is able to do this using the -ALL= (see the linked documentation). You can apply better control on this, however, and I would recommend that instead of just deleting all metadata. If you're looking to remove the location information, for example, just use some pattern matching.

Joanne C
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  • Oh, no, I want all the data stripped, but yeah I get you with the regex that's easy enough to do if I just pipe it like this or something: exiftool img.jpg | tr 'MASTER PATTERN' '.' – user3333975 Mar 05 '14 at 22:40
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I use jpegoptim for stripping metadata:
jpegoptim --strip-all filename

You could also open the image with Gimp and save it without the metadata.

jhscheer
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