Stripping out metadata

[stevehughes]

Hi all,

My jpgs have been through quite a history, back and forth between a number of DAMs. As a result they have weird bits of metadata buried away in a heap of different places. I’d really like to clean this up. Can anyone suggest a way (either in PSU or some external utility) to strip out all metadata except the info that would have come over from the camera?

[Mke]

Try ExifTool: https://sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/
...with, in Windows, ExifToolGUI if you're not keen on the command line: http://u88.n24.queensu.ca/~bogdan/

I gather that there is similar GUI software for the Mac

[Hert]

In addition to Mike's reply....you can indeed use ExifTool. Use that to remove all IPTC-IIM (classic IPTC), and the XMP. Then start from there. That will only leave you with the Exif. You may have used products that also alter Exif so you can never be 100% sure that you're back to the virgin state of your metadata.

[snowman1]

I also find geosetter quite useful for editing/stripping the metadata, it also acts as a GUI front-end to exiftool.

[stevehughes]

Thanks all for the input. EXIFtool is a very powerful tool. I think I can come to grips with the command-line, limited mainly by my shallow understanding of metadata structure.

Back to Hert's suggestion, and to check my understanding, is this what you had in mind?

exiftool -all= --exif:all *.jpg

It seems to do what I expect but I'd like to check with the experts!

Thanks,
Steve

[stevehughes]

So thanks to you folks I think I've got this pretty well cleaned up.

I started with exiftool -r -all= --exif:all *.jpg

exiftool raised errors on a bunch of files with mangled makernotes so I ran exiftool -makernotes= over those files and then re-ran the above on them.

Then I found some old tags in a field named "XP keywords", so i dumped that using exiftool -r -XPkeywords= *.jpg

I 'think' that takes care of it.