[Shotwell] How to remove metadata from photo files?

[Dougie Nisbet]

On 17/10/11 13:44, Thomas Jost wrote:
> On Mon, 17 Oct 2011 13:33:06 +0100, Colin Law<clanlaw at googlemail.com>  wrote:
>> On 17 October 2011 13:21, Thomas Jost<schnouki at schnouki.net>  wrote:
>>> Hi list,
>>>
>>> I've been using Shotwell for several months now and I really like it.
>>> Lightweight and efficient -- just what I like on my computers running
>>> Arch Linux.
>>>
>>> When I switched to Shotwell, I enabled the option to write tags and
>>> other metadata inside the photo files. Since then I realized that it's
>>> probably a bad idea when you want to do regular backups. (Right now I'm
>>> using unison to backup and sync the DB and pictures on several
>>> computers, but I'd like to switch to a real VCS like git/git-annex or
>>> boar).
>>>
>>> So is there a (simple) way to remove these metadata while leaving the
>>> pictures intact? I'm perfectly fine with long command lines and
>>> shell/Python/Perl scripts, it's just that I don't know where to start
>>> and I'm a little lost with all these EXIF, IPTC and XMP things :)
>> I don't understand why you would want to remove the metadata.  What
>> harm is it doing?
> The problem is that if I add a simple tag to a photo, the file will be
> modified.

But surely if you configure shotwell so that it doesn't write metadata 
this will no longer happen?

(reading your post to the end :) )- If it's just a case of being tidy, 
you could look at jhead and exiftool. The --purejpg option for jhead 
should in theory do it, but I've had more success with exiftool. I used 
to use:

|exiftool -all= *

|when I was using f-spot and it didn't like certain camera headers

http://www.bluecedar.org.uk/?p=76

Dougie