Use exiftool to remove most metadata

metadata-delete-most-keep-a-few.md

Introduction

If you upload a photo somewhere, for instance to Flickr as I do, you might not be interested in exposing all the metadata a file contains.

I have started to use the excellent exiftool to manage the metadata exposed on photos that are publicly available.

I came across this excellent webpage, which is a good read.

BEWARE: The example below preserves Artist and CopyRight tags, which might give away your email.

Exiftool usage

I use this command to remove most metadata. The example modifies the file "test.jpg" to only include a subset of the metadata my photos contain.

exiftool -all:all= \
    -tagsfromfile @ \
		-ColorSpaceTags \
		-ICC_Profile \
    -ProfileDecription \
    -exif:ExposureTime \
    -exif:CreateDate \
    -exif:FNumber \
    -exif:ImageSize \
    -LensId \
    -exif:Rights \
    -exif:Title \
    -exif:FocalLength \
    -exif:Subject \
    -exif:ISO \
    -Exif:Artist \
    -Exif:CopyRight \
    -Iptc:By-line \
    -Xmp-dc:all \
    -Xmp-iptcExt:Event \
		-Xmp:CreatorTool \
		-Exif:Software \
    -ProfileDescription test.jpg

Exiftool is also good for adding metadata, like this:

exiftool -Exif:Artist="Per Jensen" test.jpg

# XMP Title
exiftool -Xmp-dc:Title="En title til dette billede" test.jpg

exiftool -Exif:CopyRight="Per Jensen <per2jensen@gmail.com>" test.jpg

# tagging, the -Xmp-dc:Subject field can be used
exiftool -Xmp-dc:Subject="trold sø roskilde" test.jpg

# Tag for "events"
exiftool -Xmp-iptcExt:Event="walk" test.jpg

Darktable

At some point a I will add something like this to darktable's workflow, that would be very nice.