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windowscommand-lineexifexiftool

Howto find specifc metadata content and delete it from pictures?

I try to find a specific metadata content like "Odeon" in my *.jpg files with the help of exiftool.exe and then delete this specific tag from the file.

I can't find "Odeon" with the command

exiftool -if "$keywords =~ /Odeon/" .

I know it's there, for this example, the content is stored in the tag "Location".

Can please someone tell me, howto
a) find the content, wherever it will be stored inside a *.jpg
b) delete exactly this found tag from this file (without backup of the file)?

Solution

  • The reason that your command doesn't work is because you're only checking the Keywords tag. Location is a different tag and you would have check there for that info.

    Unfortunately, Exiftool doesn't have the ability to list only the tags that have matching data. You can pipe the output through another command line program like Find (since you're on Windows) or Grep (other platforms). In that case, your command line would look like this:
    exiftool -g1 -a -s FileOrDir | Find "Odeon"
    That would list all the tags that have your info.

    After you found the tag, you could then remove it without having a backup file with this command, replacing TAG with the name of the tag:
    exiftool -overwrite_original -TAG= FileOrDir
    Take note that this command would remove that tag from all the files if you specify a dir. If you want to be more selective and the tag contains ONLY the text "Odeon", then you could use this command. Note that this command is case sensitive. It would not remove "oDeON" or other variations:
    exiftool -overwrite_original -TAG-="Odeon" FileOrDir
    If you wanted to remove a certain tag that contains "Odeon" as part of a longer string and be case insensitive, then you could add the -if option.
    exiftool -overwrite_original -if "$TAG=~/odeon/i" -TAG= FileOrDir

    Finally, there is the shotgun approach using the -api "Filter=…" option. This requires version 10.05 or greater. This command:
    exiftool -overwrite_original -api "Filter=s/odeon//gi" -tagsfromfile @ -all:all FileOrDir
    would remove "odeon" (case insensitive) from all tags in the file. It would not remove the tag and if odeon was part of a longer string, the rest of the string would remain. For example, if Location was equal to "Odeon", it would become a blank string. If Description was "This is Odeon", it would become "This is ". The part after "Filter=" is a perl regex substitution and you could further refine it by looking into regex.