Removing EXIF Data From Images and Photos in Linux

Most digital cameras and cell phone add EXIF metadata to the images.

EXIF metadata includes camera specifications, settings, location (GPS coordinates) and more.

If you’re worried about the privacy, you may want to anonymize your images and photos by removing all the EXIF metadata.

In this small guide, i’ll show how to read and then remove all EXIF metadata, using Linux command line utility, named ExifTool.

Install ExifTool

Under Ubuntu/Linux Mint/Dedian etc.:

$ sudo apt-get install libimage-exiftool-perl

Read EXIF Metadata from Image

Extract and view all EXIF metadata from an image or photo:

$ exiftool image.jpeg

Remove EXIF Metadata from Image

Remove all EXIF metadata from an image or photo:

$ exiftool -all= image.jpeg

Remove EXIF Data from Multiple Files

The next commands, also makes copies of the original files with the “_original” prefix.

Go into the directory with the images.

Execute the following command to remove all EXIF metadata from all images in the current directory:

$ exiftool -all= *

Remove EXIF metadata from images with “.jpeg” extensions only:

$ exiftool -all= *.jpeg
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7 Replies to “Removing EXIF Data From Images and Photos in Linux”

  1. Thx a lot

  2. Откуда вы взяли параметр -all=? По команде man exiftool нет никакого -all=.

  3. Thanks for your tutorial. Perhaps you mean “multiple files”.

    1. Thanks.

  4. Hi, how do I remove metadata on a .png file? I keep having “1 files weren’t updated due to errors” when I use exiftool on .png but not on .jpg

    I don’t want to save change the properties of .png because it will only look bad. How do I fix this?

    1. Try to not used PNG file format, it may not supported/

      1. Peter A. Cejchan says: Reply

        You can try to convert PNG to lossless JPEG, remove exif tags, and convert back to PNG.

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