Removing IPTC Tags

[jch2103]

As has been discussed in this Forum several times, It's a prucent thing to use only XMP metadata tags, and not the old IPTC-Classic tags, which are now considered obsolete. Among other problems, using both the old IPTC tags and newer XMP tags can result in synchronization problems (such as a cycle of of repeatedly re-writing metadata).

One can use the Metadata Command Processor to delete these obsolete tags using this syntax:

-overwrite_original_in_place
-IPTC:All=
{Files}

I was able to clean up some 20,000 images that contained old IPTC tags using this set of commands. However, I discovered that I still had about a thousand images the refused to clean up properly. I contacted Phil on the ExifTool forum, and he found that these files had IPTC data in the wrong location http://u88.n24.queensu.ca/exiftool/forum/index.php/topic,8324.msg42743.html#msg42743. He gave me this set of commands, which seems to have solved the problem.

-overwrite_original_in_place
-IPTC:All=
-exifversion-=dummy
{Files}

Phil is an invaluable resource and ExifTool is a crucial tool for managing metadata.

[Menace]

Thank you for sharing. Always good to know.

[Aubrey]

you can add
-v2
or -v3

This gives you verbose information showing what is being changed. -v3 gives more information than -v2

Aubrey.