The internet is a big place with a lot of people (and bots) meddling around. Digital images can sometimes contain metadata that can reveal personal information.
When you upload images to social media sites suchas X (Twitter), Facebook, Instagram, etc., the personal metadata (GPS location, Camera ID, etc.) is removed during the upload process.
If you’re a small blogger who is uploading images directly to your server, you may be leaking your location without realizing it.
Exif data
Wikipedia has a good article on what data is stored as part of the Exif format within common image formats.
Information like GPS location, Camera type / ID, etc. is the information that can reveal where you are located and what type of device you’re using.
Solving the problem
Phil Harvey has created a robust tool, exiftool, to read and write Exif data.
The application documentation provides examples that have the reading and writing commands we need.
To read all metadata:
exiftool -a -u -g1 <image/directory/regex>
To remove all metadata:
exiftool -all= <image/directory/regex>
Privacy