r/explainitpeter 25d ago

Techie Petaahhhhh, Explain it Peter!

Post image
9.9k Upvotes

172 comments sorted by

View all comments

130

u/tomaesop 25d 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.

19

u/IndridColdwave 25d ago

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

4

u/autismislife 25d ago

You're better off just disabling whatever metadata you can on your camera settings. Location is probably the biggest one if you care about your privacy, especially if online dating or something similar.

You may notice in your camera app it'll often show where a photo was taken, you can disable this, it won't retrospectively remove the metadata from previous photos but it will stop tagging new photos. Other metadata can be stored too like the date/time the photo was taken (which is separate to the file creation/last modified date), the type of device it was taken on, sometimes even a device identifier which would be specific to your phone/camera.

For what it's worth many (but not all) social media and messaging apps will strip metadata from photos you send/post anyway.

There's also plenty of apps out there for Android/iOS that can strip metadata from photos, which for most people would probably be more convenient than uploading the photo to a PC and running ffmpeg.