Exif, stands for Exchangeable image file format, which we usually use to recognize the camera manufacturer, model, exposure time in a digital photo, it is a standard that specifies the formats for images, sound, and ancillary tags used by digital cameras (or digital devices in nowadays, like smart phones and tablets), scanners and other systems handling image and sound files recorded by digital cameras.

Exif in JPEG image example from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Konqueror_Exif_data.jpg

Exif can help us know more about the photos and audios, but may also leaks the valuable and privacy info if you don’t want to let others know that you just want to share pictures with others, it will also cost a small disk space, but uf you don’t need it or you don’t want it, it’s also a waste of disk space, so you may want to remove that info like me in some situation. Here is the steps to remove Exif under command line.

Install exiftool:

Make sure you can now use exiftool:

If you would like to see the current exist info, use this command, filename.jpg is the picture you want to manipulate:

Now you can remove Exif info:

By default, it will backup your file to filename_oringinal, like filename.jpg -> filename.jpg_original, so you don’t need to worry about the backup, if you don’t want it, you can also add parameter -overwrite_original to prevent to backup file been generated.

After you remove the Exif info, you will find the modified file be a little bit smaller now.

If you take a look at its info, you will find that there are only some basic info remaing:

That’s all.