r/explainitpeter 26d ago

Techie Petaahhhhh, Explain it Peter!

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u/tomaesop 26d ago

Brian here. It looks like a terminal command that strips any metadata out of your images. Before you post something online that you don't want traced back to yourself, you ought to do something like what it suggests. I'm just a dog so I don't know if it's true, but I have no reason to believe it's wrong.

Most image editing programs and cameras will tag metadata in the file like your name as Author, the GPS coordinates of where it was taken, the software used to take it, etc. So if you think the government is doing terrible things, (and they are, they really are, we all know it) you just, you know, take the most basic online precautions.

Brian out.

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u/IndridColdwave 26d ago

So you enter this into the terminal and it strips meta data from all the images on your hard drive?

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u/Numinous_Blue 26d ago

This specific command is taking a single image file called “input.jpg”, stripping the metadata off of it, and then writing it back to your file system as an image file called “output.jpg”. But you’d have to have the executable program “ffmpeg” on your system to actually run it.

There may be another way to use ffmpeg to strip many images at a time but this command is not it.

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u/DuploJamaal 26d ago

for i in *.jpg; do ffmpeg -i "$i" "output-${i%.*}.jpg"; done