DEV Community

Max
Max

Posted on

Strip GPS and EXIF From a Whole Folder of Photos Before You Publish (Local, No Upload)

#security #privacy #bash #webdev

Every JPEG your phone takes can carry the exact GPS coordinates of where you stood. Post a few "harmless" photos online and you may be broadcasting your home address, your kid's school, your gym. Most people find this out the hard way.

You don't need a website that "cleans metadata" — you can strip every image in a folder locally in one command. Nothing leaves your machine.

The one-liner (exiftool) 

# macOS: brew install exiftool  |  Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt install libimage-exiftool-perl
exiftool -all= -overwrite_original -r ./photos
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode
  • -all= removes all metadata (GPS, timestamps, camera serial, software).
  • -overwrite_original skips the .jpg_original backups.
  • -r recurses into subfolders.

Verify nothing sensitive remains:

exiftool -gps:all -make -model ./photos
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Empty output = clean.

Keep orientation, drop everything else

Stripping -all= can rotate photos that relied on the EXIF orientation flag. Preserve just that one tag:

exiftool -all= --Orientation -overwrite_original -r ./photos
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

A tiny reusable script

Save as clean-photos.sh:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
set -euo pipefail
target="${1:-.}"
echo "Stripping metadata from images in: $target"
exiftool -all= --Orientation -overwrite_original -r \
  -ext jpg -ext jpeg -ext png -ext webp "$target"
echo "Done. Verifying GPS is gone:"
exiftool -gps:all -r "$target" | grep -i gps || echo "No GPS tags found. ✅"
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode 
chmod +x clean-photos.sh
./clean-photos.sh ~/Pictures/to-publish
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Why local matters

Uploading photos to an online "EXIF remover" means handing your original, geotagged images — the exact thing you're trying to protect — to a third-party server. Do it locally and the sensitive data never leaves your disk.

If you only have one or two images and don't want to touch a terminal, QuickShrink strips metadata (and compresses) entirely in your browser — the file never uploads. But for a whole folder, the exiftool script above is faster and scriptable.

TL;DR

  • Photos carry GPS. Assume every image does until proven otherwise.
  • exiftool -all= --Orientation -overwrite_original -r ./photos cleans a folder locally.
  • Verify with exiftool -gps:all.
  • Never upload the originals you're trying to protect.

Top comments (0)