Photos carry hidden metadata: camera model, timestamps, editing software — and often GPS coordinates of exactly where the shot was taken. Publishing images with that intact is both a page-weight cost and a privacy leak. This guide strips EXIF, GPS and ICC metadata from a whole folder in one command with assetopt, locally and with no upload.

The short version: it’s the default

assetopt strips image metadata by default (stripMetadata: true). So the base command already does it:

npm install -g @assetopt/cli
assetopt optimize ./images

Every JPEG, PNG, WebP and AVIF written to the output folder has its EXIF/ICC metadata removed — you get the privacy win and a smaller file, with nothing to configure. Your originals are left untouched.

Verify it worked

Check an output file with exiftool (or any EXIF viewer). Before, a camera JPEG is full of tags:

exiftool ./images/beach.jpg | grep -Ei 'gps|make|model|date'
# GPS Latitude ... / Camera Model Name ... / Create Date ...

After optimizing, the same query on the output file comes back essentially empty:

assetopt optimize ./images
exiftool ./optimized/beach.jpg | grep -Ei 'gps|make|model|date'
# (nothing — metadata stripped)

How much does it save?

Metadata is usually a few KB per image — modest on a large photo, but meaningful across a folder of hundreds, and it’s a pure win since it never affects visible quality. Measure it on your own set with a dry-run that writes nothing:

assetopt analyze ./images

(Most of the savings on photos come from recompression; metadata stripping is the privacy-motivated part that also trims a little off the top.)

When you want to keep metadata

Some workflows need metadata preserved — color-managed print prep (ICC profiles), or photography where you want the EXIF to travel with the file. Two ways to keep it:

Turn the flag off explicitly:

{ "images": { "stripMetadata": false } }

Or use the quality preset, which is fidelity-first and preserves metadata (and pins a high quality floor) in one line:

{ "preset": "quality" }

See compress images without losing quality for when the quality preset is the right call.

Strip metadata as part of a bigger optimization

Because stripping is on by default, it happens automatically whenever you optimize — including in a pre-deploy or CI run. There’s no separate “remove metadata” step to add; it’s baked into every assetopt optimize.

Next steps

npm install -g @assetopt/cli
assetopt optimize ./images     # strips EXIF/GPS/ICC by default

See the feature catalog for the full image defaults, including per-format quality and the stripMetadata behavior.