Removing Exif Data from an Image on Linux using exiftool

Exif data, also known as metadata, contains information about the camera settings, location, and other details about an image. Those metatada can be useful for photographers and image editors, but in some cases, you may want to remove Exif data from an image for privacy or security reasons. In this blog post, we will show how to remove Exif data from an image on Linux using the exiftool command line tool.

Installing exiftool

exiftool is a command line tool available on Linux distributions for reading, writing, and manipulating Exif metadata in image files. Before you can use exiftool, you need to install it. If you are using a Debian-based distribution such as Ubuntu, you can install exiftool by running the following command in your terminal:

sudo apt-get install libimage-exiftool-perl

Removing Exif data from an image

Once you have installed exiftool, you can use the following command to remove all Exif data from an image:

exiftool -all= image.jpg

This command will remove all Exif metadata from the image.jpg file and save the output to a new file with the same name, but with the original file backed up with a _original suffix.

If you want to save the output to a new file with a different name, you can use the following command:

exiftool -all= -o output_image.jpg image.jpg

This will save the Exif-stripped image to output_image.jpg file.