Digital cameras (including smartphones) and computers (screenshots) embed technical metadata into image files. It serves great purpose to record image profiles but it could exposed some private information i.e., device profiles, GPS coordinates, etc and thus caused privacy issues.

Before share images online, strip clean the image EXIF (Exchangeable Image File) metadata. The libimage-exiftool-perl package contains the library and program to read and write meta information in multimedia files.

$ sudo apt-get install libimage-exiftool-perl

To view the exif metadata:

$ exiftool /path/to/image.jpg

A single file:

$ exiftool -all= /path/to/image.jpg

All under the target directory:

$ exiftool -all= /path/to/images/*.jpg

To set a property e.g., Copyright:

$ exiftool -Copyright=your-copyrighted-text image.jpg