All the photos you share online contain metadata. This metadata can include:
- the location the photo was taken
- the time the photo was taken
- detailed information about your camera / phone
Facebook (and most other online advertisers) make money by tracking and selling your personal information. But you should be in control of what information you share with the world.
Enter the exif_delete tool.
This is a simple Python script that I use to strip all of the metadata from my photos before I share them online. It is lightweight and easy-to-use. If you are like me, you take a lot of photos, and this tool will help protect your privacy.
This script will work with Python v3.4 to v3.7 and only requires one third-party library: PIL.
You can install this tool using PyPI to grab the code and install it online by doing:
pip install exif_delete
Or you can install from this repo locally:
python setup.py install
This is a simple commandline tool. Just pass the name of the image file(s) you want to strip to the script, and it will do the rest:
python exif_delete.py /path/to/my/image.jpg
python exif_delete.py image1.jpg image2.png image3.gif
python exif_delete.py /path/to/*/my/images/*.jpg
By default, the script will create a new image file with "_safe" appended to the file name. For instance, this:
/full/path/to/image1234.jpg
will become:
/full/path/to/image1234_safe.jpg
However, if you want to just over-write the original image file by stripping all the EXIF data from it, you can add the --replace flag:
python exif_delete.py --replace /path/to/my/image.jpg