Advertisement

Remove EXIF Information From Photos In Linux

Modern smartphones and digital cameras are able to add extra information to photos you take. Images taken with these modern devices can contain information like GPS coordinates, your camera or phone model and lots of other data. It is not visible on the photo, but accessible via the file properties dialog. In this article, we will see how to remove it under Linux.

Advertisеment

Extra data mentioned above is called metadata. It is stored as per any of the metadata standards - EXIF, ITPC, or XMP. Metadata is commonly stored in file formats like JPEG, TIFF and some others. It can be very useful for professional photographers, because very often the metadata contains all the technical parameters of the photo, like ISO, brightness, aperture etc.

This information can be seen in Linux with many apps. Depending on your software set, there is a great chance that you have an app which can display it. For example, Ristretto and Thunar in my beloved XFCE can show this info in image properties.

Linux Exif In Thunar

The photo above is taken with a modern smartphone. As you can see, there are tons of extra parameters written to every image.

To privacy reasons, you may want to remove this information before uploading it to social media or sharing with your friends. Here is how it can be done.

Preparation

To remove EXIF and other personal information from images, we need the imagemagicK package installed. Search for this app suite with your distro's package manager. Depending on your distro, the command may look as follows.

apt-get install imagemagick

pacman -S imagemagick

yum install imagemagick

dnf install imagemagick

xbps-install imagemagick

Remove Personal Information from Photos

To remove EXIF Information from photos in Linux, do the following.

  1. For your convenience, place all image you want to process to the single folder.
  2. Navigate to that folder.
  3. Open a new terminal and run the following command:
    mogrify -strip your_filename.jpg

    This will remove the meta data from a single specific file.Linux Remove Exif Cmd

  4. To process all files at once, execute the command
    mogrify -strip ./*.jpg

The EXIF info will be quickly removed.

Before:

Linux Exif In Thunar

After:

Linux Remove Exif

It is worth mentioning that third-party apps can offer you more options. For example, my favorite image viewer XnView allows editing of EXIF in a useful way. Also, the recently released GIMP 2.10 app allows editings of image meta data. You might want to give it a try.Linux Remove Exif With Gimp

Support us

Winaero greatly relies on your support. You can help the site keep bringing you interesting and useful content and software by using these options:

If you like this article, please share it using the buttons below. It won't take a lot from you, but it will help us grow. Thanks for your support!

Advertisеment

Author: Sergey Tkachenko

Sergey Tkachenko is a software developer who started Winaero back in 2011. On this blog, Sergey is writing about everything connected to Microsoft, Windows and popular software. Follow him on Telegram, Twitter, and YouTube.

5 thoughts on “Remove EXIF Information From Photos In Linux”

  1. That’s worth knowing about. I must confess to a reluctance to use the command line if a GUI is available simply because I don’t know syntax and it’s not always clear if there’s a space or a wildcard of some kind even when an article includes instructions. When I manage to get GIMP 2.10 installed, all should be well. :)

  2. Thanks, the EXIF got stripped out of images I really had been trying hard to do with another tool that kept on failing to produce the required field restrictions or alterations, this did the trick in seconds.

    So if you are here because exiftool is not cutting it, this worked for my.

    Using MX Linux as a DEBIAN strain of the Linux distro.

  3. One of those commands you always forget and have to use the googler to remind you what the syntax is, thanks!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

css.php
Using Telegram? Subscribe to the blog channel!
Hello. Add your message here.