Remove EXIF Metadata from Photos with exiftool

Productivity Sauce

Sometimes, it is a good idea to scrub EXIF metadata from photos before sharing them, and there is no better tool for the job than exiftool. The command below nukes all EXIF metadata in a photo in one fell swoop (replace foo.jpg with the actual file name):

exiftool -all= foo.jpg

This command removes EXIF metadata from the specified photo, but what if you need to process multiple photos? Then you can use the following command which cleans all the photos in the current directory:

for i in *.jpg; do echo "Processing $i"; exiftool -all= "$i"; done

Instead of purging all EXIF metadata from a photo, you can also remove individual fields. For example, the following command can come in handy when you need to remove geographical coordinates embedded in the photo:

exiftool -geotag= foo.jpg

And the command below can help you to remove geotags from multiple photos in one go:

for i in *.jpg; do echo "Processing $i"; exiftool -geotag= "$i"; done

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