Multiverse 2.357

When people ask me about metadata and they’re not asking about a phone app, I default to saying exiftool because it’s fabulous and it’s the tool that I like. But it’s rarely a good answer for most people who want simpler things. So I looked at MAT2, the successor to Metadata Anonymisation Toolkit (MAT).

It is a python script with only a couple of options, but supports a LOT of file formats, including most office document formats, image formats, and many audio and video formats.

The thing I noticed immediately is that it only shows you the EXIF data that it considers revealing, and that it’s going to remove. This is the only command line switch you’ll need to use, and this was surely a design decision. So $ mat2 -s <filename> will show you the fields MAT2 is concerned with.

Notice that MAT2 does not alter the file you clean, it creates a new one with a “cleaned” extension instead. Note also that it’s not going to let you do things like change the values of fields or add comments. It will, however, remove metadata from a folder full of images:

$ mat2 vacation_photos/*.png

It’s just a basic, easy to use metadata remover suitable for quickly removing metadata from a group of images. So go ahead, give it a try:

$ sudo apt install mat2