Stripping All Meta Data -- File Creation Date/time

[asjones]

After reading a few privacy articles and just being curious I was playing around with ExifTool to remove all meta data.
I noticed that -ALL= removed and updated everything except that the File Creation Date/Time is still the original not the new date/time like the modification or Access one.

It would be nice if the creation date/time was updated to match the others.

Windows 7
ExifTool v 10.57


thanks

Alan

[StarGeek]

FileCreateDate is not metadata internal to the file, it is part of the underlying OS.   If you uploade a file, for example, this data will not be available.  If you copy the file, the copy will have a different timestamp.  About the only time this could be a privacy issue is when the person invading your privacy has direct access to your computer.  At that point, you have bigger problems anyway.

[asjones]

StarGeek,

I thought about that, but somehow it just seemed like it would be nice to change that also. Especially if one stored file on a shared drive or network drive. I know uploading them to a website this would not be visible, but what about other options.

I am not worried, but trying to think about it from a hard core security perspective.

[Phil Harvey]

Hi Alan,

Try doing this:

exiftool -all= -filecreatedate=now DIR

- Phil

[asjones]

Hi Phil,

Wow that is one of the things I love (and sometimes drives me crazy about ExifTool.  There are ton's of commands and ways to use them.  I had searched for various key words etc and did not see this and not sure the "now" would have clicked in my head to use that anyway.

thanks

Now if we could just strip out metadata out of PDFs and Office Files.
I am still confused as to why PDF meta data has to be reversible and can not be completely stripped. Learned that based on reviewing
http://www.exiftool.org/TagNames/PDF.html

thanks again

Alan

[Phil Harvey]

Hi Alan,

The "Now" tag is mentioned in FAQ 5.

See this post for a technique to permanently delete information from PDF files.

- Phil

[asjones]

Hi Phil,

Thanks for the link to FAQ 5. One of these days I will figure out a better way to digest all the docs. I am glad you try to document everything.

The qpdf tool looks like a neat option. I do wonder if it is still being maintained.

I do hope you will keep a -linearize / clear all meta data option in the back of your mind for ExifTool so if a simple/clean way to implement it comes to mind you would consider implementing it.

Ideally having something like
ExifTool -clean <-overwrite>  <in_file> <out_file>
would be really cool..... something that would clear all tags, dates and any other meta data on most image formats (JPG, etc), PDFs, Office Docs, and some others. 

There is an increasing privacy movement and this cold be nice for some.

thanks for all your great work

Alan

[Phil Harvey]

Hi Alan,

I do hope you will keep a -linearize / clear all meta data option in the back of your mind for ExifTool so if a simple/clean way to implement it comes to mind you would consider implementing it.

At one point I stated that it was unlikely ExifTool would ever support writing PDF files, but what made this possible was the incremental update.  Without this, the entire PDF would need to be rewritten, which would be much more complicated.  So linearizing the PDF would be very difficult.  I'll state now that it is unlikely that ExifTool will ever be able to do this.

- Phil