raynix 筆記

Remove GPS Coordinates From Images Before Uploading to SNS

The recent events(I meant around NYD 2021) in US are quite shocking to me.

  • Trump and his supporters were banned from major SNS platforms
  • The one which didn’t ban them, Parler, got banned from the cloud platforms which Parler runs on, eg. AWS, iOS, Android
  • Parler’s data got scraped by a group of hackers
  • All images Trump supporters uploaded to Parler still have GPS coordinates in them. This could be the best set of evidence in the history

I probably should not post anything meaningful to an SNS but when I still do, here are something I can do to improve protection for privacy.

First the GPS coordinates in photos are added by smart phones and this can usually be turned off. Search for location tags or similar term in camera settings.

For existing images, GPS data can be deleted using following commands in Ubuntu Linux

# install exiftool
sudo apt install libimage-exiftool-perl
# remove GPS data from 1 photo
exiftool -gps:*= my-photo.jpg
# remove GPS data from all .jpg in current directory
find . -name \*.jpg -exec exiftool -gps:*= {} \;

🙂

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