Goal

I will guide to you in a simple and clever way to remove EXIF information (metadata) from your images, using just command line’s utilities.

Prerequisites

Install exiftool command utility.

For Ubuntu:

  sudo apt-get install libimage-exiftool-perl

For other systems check the exiftool website.

Prepare files

Optionally you can create a new directory with a copy of the files in case you want to conserve the original ones with the EXIF data on them.

  • Create a temporary directory where you can paste all the images to remove their metadata: mkdir ~/Pictures/tmp

  • Copy the images over this directory: cp ~/Pictures/holidays ~/Pictures/tmp

Prepare script

  • Now create a file that will contain the script: touch remove_metadata.sh

  • Past the following the following code into the file:

  #!/bin/bash
  cd ~/Pictures/tmp
  exiftool -all= *
  echo "y" | exiftool -delete_original *

  • Make sure to replace ~/Pictures/tmp with the desired path to the images to remove metadata. Note: it will replace them!

  • Save script and mark it as runnable by giving it executable permissions: chmod +x remove_metadata.sh

Run script

The script can be ran from the command line or doing double-click over an icon in you GNU/Linux system.

You won’t have to worry anymore about any GEO localization, edits, dates, etc.