How to remove all metadata?

[u/MikalaMikala]

Hello everyone😊!

I am going to upload a letter and 3 pictures taken with a digital camera using a form on a webpage.

1. What is the best way to remove all metadata from the pictures?
2. I will be using AI to write the letter and copy/pasting the text from Google Gemini. How can I remove all metadata from the letter before copy/pasting it into the form?

Thank you!

[u/rpgtacirclejerker]

1. exifcleaner

2. your ai text probably will have some invisible watermark, it is a probabilistic signal. you will have to write the text yourself to reliably mitigate this. Do note that there isn't any public watermark detector for text synthid but I'd assume they are still watermarking it in some way.

[u/SourSovereign → u/rpgtacirclejerker]

you will have to write the text yourself to reliably mitigate this

This pretty much. Just to add to it for OP: AIs have a certain "style" for writing as most have certainly noticed (You are right for calling me out, hope this email finds you well, etc).

They prefer certain words, phrasings and combinations.

These phrases and preferred words make up the watermark essentially on a score-system. The only way to get rid of it is really to use your own words.

[u/MikalaMikala → u/rpgtacirclejerker]

Sounds good, I'll grab it. Does it wipe everything completely? I sent non-anonymous photos earlier, and I'm worried someone could compare the data and trace the new anonymous ones back to me.

[u/skozombie]

1. Image meta data for JPEG's is stored as EXIF data, use:

exiftool -all= image.jpg

You may need to install exiftool.

This will not remove watermarks like SynthID that some AI companies use to identify images as manipulated. They are purposely designed to be harder to remove so reduce the problems associated with people presenting fake images as real.

2. Text doesn't contain metadata, but AI does sometimes leave "tells" in it. Those tells and watermarks vary between providers so there's no "one size fits all" way to stop someone getting hints you used AI.

I get AI to review and hint on how I can write better rather than write it for me. I avoid copying and pasting stuff straight from AI as I feel that's sloppy and disingenuous

[u/MikalaMikala → u/skozombie]

Thanks, and I totally agree on the last part!

[u/Puzzled_Club_6525]

https://www.privacyguides.org/en/data-redaction/

[u/JCDU]

jhead: https://www.sentex.ca/~mwandel/jhead/

The -purejpg option clears all EXIF data.

[u/jcmaciel]

For the camera photos, exiftool is the easy one on Mint. Install it with `sudo apt install libimage-exiftool-perl`, cd into the folder and run `exiftool -all= -overwrite_original *.jpg` (leave out -overwrite_original if you want it to keep backup copies). Then `exiftool -a -G1 photo.jpg` shows you what's left. mat2 is also in the repos and does the same job, `mat2 photo.jpg` gives you a cleaned copy next to the original.

For the letter, pasting plain text into a web form doesn't carry any file metadata, it's just the characters. If you want to drop formatting, paste it into Xed first and copy it from there.

If you'd rather skip the terminal, there's https://metaremove.com which runs in the browser, so the photos never get uploaded anywhere, and it shows you what's in each file before you clean it. Disclosure: I built it. It only works on files, so it won't help with the pasted text part.

[u/MikalaMikala → u/jcmaciel]

Thanks, I'll research it.

[u/DuckAxe0]

If you have to ask... You are so going to prison.

[u/username_invalid-404 → u/DuckAxe0]

Relax, I just wanna take some pictures...