Delete All, completely strip everything

[mcquiff]

Hi I am searching around and I can see it has been asked a few times, but still no conclusive answer,

I want to delete everything, in attempt to reduce the file size a little.
When I run exiftool -s I would like to see none of that after it has been stripped.

I've enclosed a file.

thanks in advance

[Hayo Baan]

Deleting every piece of metadata is actually quite simple: exiftool -all= FILES. This will remove all metadata that can (safely) be removed from a file.

With your file:

Code Select Expand

$ exiftool -all= LM85ER_20190925114526.jpg
    1 image files updated
$ exiftool -a -G0:1 -s LM85ER_20190925114526.jpg
[ExifTool]      ExifToolVersion                 : 11.67
[File:System]   FileName                        : LM85ER_20190925114526.jpg
[File:System]   Directory                       : .
[File:System]   FileSize                        : 190 kB
[File:System]   FileModifyDate                  : 2019:10:01 12:24:16+02:00
[File:System]   FileAccessDate                  : 2019:10:01 12:24:17+02:00
[File:System]   FileInodeChangeDate             : 2019:10:01 12:24:16+02:00
[File:System]   FilePermissions                 : rw-r--r--
[File]          FileType                        : JPEG
[File]          FileTypeExtension               : jpg
[File]          MIMEType                        : image/jpeg
[File]          ImageWidth                      : 1000
[File]          ImageHeight                     : 1310
[File]          EncodingProcess                 : Baseline DCT, Huffman coding
[File]          BitsPerSample                   : 8
[File]          ColorComponents                 : 3
[File]          YCbCrSubSampling                : YCbCr4:4:4 (1 1)
[APP14:Adobe]   DCTEncodeVersion                : 100
[APP14:Adobe]   APP14Flags0                     : [14]
[APP14:Adobe]   APP14Flags1                     : (none)
[APP14:Adobe]   ColorTransform                  : YCbCr
[Composite]     ImageSize                       : 1000x1310
[Composite]     Megapixels                      : 1.3


As you can see there is still some metadata, but that metadata is all required.
The data in [File:System] is from the file system and can not be removed, [File] is the data defining the JPG (and thus can not be removed), and [APP14:Adobe] is a special segment that actually can be removed, but doing so may alter the  appearance of the image. From the tag documentation: The APP14 "Adobe" segment stores image encoding information for DCT filters. This segment may be copied or deleted as a block using the Extra "Adobe" tag, but note that it is not deleted by default when deleting all metadata because it may affect the appearance of the image.

[mcquiff]

Thanks, I'm not sure what I did wrong as I thought i'd used that command yet I still had lots of stuff showing in there.

All good now so many thanks!