I've got a script which allows a user to delete all metadata from an image except the values of tags stored in a whitelist. I thought the exiftool invocation would be something as simple as: exiftool -all= --Creator --Copyright image.jpg Then I realized the docs make it clear that won't work - "Note that this will not exclude individual tags from a group delete. Instead, the tags must be recovered using the -TagsFromFile option". So I figured to use the -TagsFromFile option instead, something like: exiftool -all= -TagsFromFile image.jpg -Copyright -Creator image.jpg But in that case I get the following output: Warning: Error parsing XMP - image.jpg 1 image files updated And the resulting JPEG still appears to have all of it's metadata. In the end, I resorted to an ugly solution that involves three invocations of exiftool: 1. Use exiftool to read the tags I'm interested in keeping 2. Use exiftool -all= to remove all metadata 3. Use exiftool to add the tags I preserved in step 3 back to the file Is there a single step way of wiping all metadata except specific tags? I can live with some limitations - for instance, if some tags cannot be preserved individually. PS, love love love Exiftool. This is the first stumper I've had in several years. Best, R

The bug fix was simple, so I decided to release the Perl version of 7.23 now instead of waiting. I have also added a test to make sure this doesn't get broken again.

Sorry for any inconvenience, and thanks again for reporting this.

- Phil

Yes, that's the one. And you can use "-tagsfromfile @" to allow this command to be used on multiple files (or just to avoid having to type the file name twice).

- Phil

This note in the Installing documentation may help:

"(Note: The OS X installations above place exiftool and its "lib" directory in /usr/bin, while the standard Unix "make install" described below puts exiftool in /usr/bin and the individual libraries in /Library/Perl/#.#.#, where "#.#.#" is your Perl version. If both sets of libraries exist, /usr/bin/lib takes precedence for exiftool, but /Library/Perl/#.## is the default for any other Perl scripts.)"

So you should delete /usr/bin/lib (after confirming it contains only ExifTool files) if you want exiftool to use the modules installed with "make install".

- Phil

Hi Paul,

With exiftool you should almost never have to loop through files yourself. You can change the -o option to something like -o %d%f_new.jpg to add "_new.jpg" to all of the file names, then instead of "original_file.jpg", use a directory name. Then all images in the directory will be rewritten. Or, a different way to do this is to use something like -o publish_dir/%f.jpg to write the new images with the original names to a different directory.

Your command doesn't work with CR2 images because you are effectively destroying all proprietary Canon information with -all=. Unfortunately some of this information is necessary for converting the image. In general, you have to be very careful about deleting information from RAW images. Also, you should never change the Make and Model tags in a RAW image because without this information the converters will not be able to properly parse the file.

- Phil

Hi Paul,

Just post them here if you think they would be useful. People will search the forum and find them. Also, I realized I can simplify the syntax of my last -o example. You can just use -o DIR to output the modified images to a different directory (with the same file names).

- Phil