🧹 Metadata Removal Guide

Digital photos contain hidden EXIF metadata including GPS coordinates, device model, serial number, date/time, and sometimes your name. Before uploading any product image to a marketplace, strip all metadata. On Linux/Tails, use exiftool -all= image.jpg to remove all tags. On Windows, use ExifTool GUI or the Properties → Details → Remove Properties option. Verify metadata is removed by re-running ExifTool on the cleaned file.

PDF files, Word documents, and other office formats contain author names, editing history, creation timestamps, and sometimes file paths revealing your username and OS. Use MAT2 (Metadata Anonymisation Toolkit) on Tails to strip metadata from documents: mat2 document.pdf. For PDFs specifically, you can also print-to-PDF to create a clean copy. Always check metadata before sharing any file, even if you did not create it originally.

The primary tools for metadata removal are: ExifTool (cross-platform, handles 100+ file formats, command-line), MAT2 (integrated in Tails OS, handles images, documents, audio, video, archives), and GIMP (export images without metadata by unchecking Save EXIF/XMP in export options). For bulk processing, use exiftool -all= -r /folder/ to recursively strip all metadata from files in a directory. Verify results with exiftool -a filename.