Batch removal of tags/keywords from pictures

Jul 14, '10 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: kaz219

I used exiftool for batch removal of keywords for a long time, but recently it stopped working. I could still overwrite keywords, but as soon as I deleted the keyword, the old ones were back. After examining the binary files directly, I found out that at least Aperture writes the keywords as XMP Subject, and that Preview falls back to XMP Subject if there is no IPTC Tags. That's why when I overwrote the keywords, it seemed to work: XMP Subject tags were still there, but were not displayed by Preview.

You'll need to install exiftool for this to work.

The command I now use is:

exiftool -IPTC:Keywords= -XMP:Subject= [a-zA-Z0-9]*.jpg ; rm -f *_original
This will remove all keywords from all the .jpg files in the current directory, for example.

[crarko adds: I haven't tested this one. We've covered other uses of exiftool for things like image rotation in a previous hint.]

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