What tools exist to remove metadata from photos?

Question

Whenever I share my photographs, I also share lots of information that I do not want to pass on:

specific camera model that the photo was taken with
exposure time
focal ratio
...

How can I remove all those metadata for sharing?

I'm particularly looking for solutions for Max OS X.

Itai · Accepted Answer

nconvert is a fantastic tool to convert and manipulate images. It is available for a huge number of platforms in cluding Mac OS X and some plaforms I thought were long gone :)

To wipe all metadata you have to use the rmeta option, as in:

nconvert -rmeta DSCN0001.JPG

There is a small catch with all such operations depending on your camera. When you take photos in portrait orientation (the long side being vertical), some cameras create a JPEG with the rotated dimensions and others simply flag the jpeg as being rotated. In the latter case, removing all metadata will make all images appear in landscape orientation. nconvert provides an easy fix for this:

nconvert -jpegtrans exif DSCN0001.JPG

...which you have to do before removing the metadata but you can combine into one operation as in:

nconvert -jpegtrans exif -rmeta DSCN0001.JPG

PS: If you use Lightroom to export your images before publication and enable the option Minimize embdeded metadata, your images will be correctly oriented and stripped of metadata except for copyright information which is something you may want to keep embedded anyways.

user2719 · Answer

For Windows, there's a free command-line utility called PureJPEG that can be used to remove all information from a JPEG file (or a directory and its subdirectories full of files) not necessary for displaying the image. It's a one-trick pony, but its one trick appears to be exactly the one you want to see.

Answered by user2719 on July 7, 2021

asalamon74 · Answer

Imagemagick supports Unix, Mac OS X, Windows...

You can delete EXIF info using mogrify:

mogrify -strip *.jpg

joshcartme · Answer

I just found a program that has an actual gui and works great.  You just drag images onto it and it deletes all the data.

http://codewelt.com/stripper

Matt Grum · Answer

PNG files don't contain EXIF data so if you save as PNG first and then as JPEG that will remove all EXIF information with zero impact on image quality as PNG files use lossless compression. The advantage to this is that it can be done with almost any image editor on any platform.

PNG files have their own metadata fields so it would theoretically be possible for an image editor to extract the EXIF information and insert it into custom fields within the PNG but I've never seen one that did.

mhucka · Answer

Another command-line tool that can do this is exiftool, using the option -all=. Here's an example:
exiftool -all= image.jpg

You can wildcard all files in a directory using the normal Unix-style shell globbing:
exiftool -all= *.jpg

Tetsujin · Answer

Almost a decade late with this answer, but Photoshop's 'Export as…' [the replacement for 'Save for Web'] deletes almost all metadata with little option to keep it; only copyright & contact details remain, if selected.

In fact, to preserve metadata, you must use the Save for Web (Legacy) function, which still exists as of Ps 2020.

The key commands may be my own, not defaults.

What tools exist to remove metadata from photos?

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