If this sounds like your week
EXIF is a useful format feature that quietly became a privacy risk.
“strip XMP Dublin Core creator before open source release” is not about disliking metadata; it is about controlling it with a tool that matches the stakes, across a whole folder rather than one file at a time. Screenshots and sample assets bundled with repos often carry embedded creator software strings and camera-derived fields reviewers never intended to ship.
Where tooling usually breaks
Forum copy-paste does not scale to twenty thousand frames.
One wrong flag, one missed field, or one “it looked fine in the viewer” moment is enough to ship the thing you meant to remove. Manual checking does not scale.
The invisible payload
Image looks fine in the viewer EXIF: GPS, body, lens, software Client sees: the photo The internet sees: the rest → MetaForge strips it on disk