Use a wildcard and the following options to clear all metadata for all images and those found inside subdirectories. $ exiftool -recurse -all= images-folderĮxample 7. Specify the name of the directory and it’ll clear the metadata for every image file found inside. Use the -recurse option to instruct ExifTool to traverse subdirectories. $ exiftool -overwrite_original -all= image.jpgĮxample 6. Use the -overwrite_original option to remove all metadata without saving the backup files. Use the -EXIF option to remove Exif data only from a file. For example, to remove the title from the metadata: $ exiftool -title= image.jpgĮxample 4. If you only want to remove one metadata property, you can overwrite that field with empty data.

The original file will be renamed, with “_original” appended to the end of it. This command will save a new copy of your file, with the metadata removed.

Use the -all option to remove all metadata from a file. View all the metadata for an image file by using the following command. These commands assume that you’ve already changed directories to where your images files are saved.Įxample 1. Once ExifTool has been installed, use some of the example commands below in order to remove Exif data. Ubuntu, Debian, and Linux Mint: $ sudo apt install libimage-exiftool-perlįedora, AlmaLinux, CentOS, and RHEL: $ sudo dnf install perl-Image-ExifToolĪrch Linux and Manjaro: $ sudo pacman -S perl-image-exiftool You can download this program from the ExifTool website or use the appropriate command below to install it with your system’s package manager. We’ll show you all the most useful commands below. There are a variety of options that can be used with the program, such as exporting a new version of the image (without the Exif data) or simply resaving the image in-place.

This program can strip Exif metadata without recompressing the image, so there’s no loss in quality. There are quite a few tools available that can remove Exif data, but one we’ve found to work very well is ExifTool. In this guide, we’ll see how to remove EXIF data from JPG, JPEG, PNG, and other image files from the Linux command line. While this is usually a desirable feature, it can also be a privacy concern if the images are going to be shared or published online. Images that contain Exif metadata may reveal when and where a photo was taken and with what device, among other things.

How to use exiftool remove all metadata