Scrub JPEG

Whenever you upload photos to the web, need to really compress JPEGs, or want to hide embarrassing details about how exactly this photo came to be, you need to cover all your tracks.

More likely, you may be a photographer who wants to keep his shiny new lens parameters his very own little trade secret.

Exiv2 bindings are required. On MacOSX I suggest homebrew:

brew install exiv2

Then just grab the gem:

gem install scrub_jpeg

$ view_jpeg_info bachelor_party.jpg

Shows all the incriminating EXIF, IPTC, and XMP tags your friends may have slyly add to your photo.

$ scrub_jpeg bachelor_party.jpg
$ scrub_jpeg foo/bar/*.jpg
$ scrub_jpeg .
$ scrub_jpeg "my/photos/" "more/photos/*.jp"

Removes all EXIF, IPTC, and XMP tags, leaving only your actual facial expression to incriminate you. But hey, that's why we have Photoshop™.

The arguments are one or more files, directories, or shell splats. Directories are not searched recursively and only pick up files with jpg or jpeg extensions.

WARNING: This will overwrite the existing image. Make sure you have backups and be aware you are deleting all metadata tags. No undo, no passing go, no collecting $200.

I did not want to write code, I just wanted something that worked predictably.

The existing choices were either convoluted GUI editors that did lots of image manipulation related tasks, or poorly written shell scripts.

The closest thing I could find was jhead -purejpeg, which looked like my meal ticket, until I ran it on some images and found it modified the actual images!

scrub_jpeg uses exiv2 to delete all metadata tags, but will never modify the actual image. Hopefully it just does one thing well.

This is alpha software.

It is provided "AS IS" and without any express or implied warranties, including, without limitation, the implied warranties of merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose.

Use at your own risk. And make plenty of backups.