I’m being so lazy these days that I often find myself dragging and dropping photos from Apple Photos onto my Desktop, which does not strip out EXIF data, in particular geolocalisation and time zone. I still want to keep original ICC profile. I could use Apple Photos own facilities to remove metadata, or, says, ImageOptim, but I want to automate things as much as possible. Plus I have plenty of JPEGs that are lying around and I’m not sure about their state. Exiftool comes to the rescue, and it has been discussed here and there. Contrary to Dave Gauer, I do not track images added to my blog with Git so that I cannot use git ls-files or git diff-index like I do in my Makefile to add recently modified files. However, I could check which image files were added since the last commit using Bash and remove metadata easily.

For now I just want to quickly remove extraneous metadata from existing files. Running exiftool -gps:all -time:all shows everything associated with the file. Clearing up all this is just a matter of typing:

aliquote master?
» exiftool -time:all -gps:all static/img/IMG_1672.jpeg
File Modification Date/Time     : 2026:08:02 14:00:07+02:00
File Access Date/Time           : 2026:08:02 14:00:09+02:00
File Inode Change Date/Time     : 2026:08:02 14:00:07+02:00
Profile Date Time               : 2022:01:01 00:00:00

Note that this keeps the original picture using a dedicated suffix (_original) but it is easy to overwrite the file instead. Here’s a quick Bash script that does the job on all pictures in JPEG format: (I do not rely on the mimetype, image/jpeg, but that might be a safer way to proceed all files without worrying about file extension.)

wd="static/img"
total=$(ls $wd/*.{jpg,jpeg,JPG,JPEG} | wc -l)
counter=0
for f in $wd/*.{jpg,jpeg,JPG,JPEG}
do
  if [[ $(exiftool -gps:all "$f") ]]; then
      exiftool -time:all= -gps:all= -overwrite_original_in_place "$f"
      ((counter++))
  fi
done
echo "$counter out of $total files updated"

As for integrating the above into my Git workflow, I can simply check the date of the last commit and list files created since then:

aliquote master?
» lastcommit=$(git --no-pager log -1 --format="%ai")

aliquote master?
» find static/img -maxdepth 1 -type f -newermt "$lastcommit"
static/img/IMG_1672.jpeg

The above for loop will do the job for those files.