MagicDispel

Remove private metadata from photos on your own computer, without touching image quality.

magicdispel photo.jpg
magicdispel "photo one.heic" screenshot.png
magicdispel --anonymous photo.jpg

Type magicdispel and a space, drag one or more photos into the terminal, and press Enter. A cleaned copy named photo_clean.jpg appears next to each original, without the dates and times that screenshots and phone cameras put in names: Screenshot 2026-09-23 at 15.14.15.png becomes Screenshot_clean.png. Originals are never modified and existing files are never overwritten: further copies get _clean_1, _clean_2... --keep-name keeps the name as it is; --anonymous names the copy photo_<random>.jpg instead. It changes the name only, not what the picture shows.

How it works

MagicDispel does not hunt for known metadata to delete. It writes a new file from only the parts a viewer needs to show the image, such as the compressed pixels, color profile, orientation, DPI, transparency, animation timing and HDR gain maps, and leaves everything else behind: location, capture time, camera and lens details, author, comments, editing software, thumbnails, depth maps and portrait mattes, C2PA manifests, and private or unknown data blocks, wherever a format stores them.

• Image data is copied byte for byte. Only BMP is re-encoded, losslessly, as PNG.
• ICC color profiles keep their color data; their dates become a fixed placeholder (2000-01-01), their descriptions Clean, and device and creator fields are cleared.
• Every result is checked before it is saved. The format's rebuilder parses it again on its own; Pillow must decode identical pixels and frames (for HEIC, which Pillow cannot decode, every image item is compared byte for byte instead); and ExifTool, if installed, gives an independent second reading. If any check fails, nothing is saved.
• Everything happens on your computer: no uploads, telemetry or network access.

This is not an anonymity tool. What the picture shows, a match with a copy published earlier, or the account it is shared from can still identify people and places. Removing depth and style data also limits later portrait, depth-of-field and style edits. See privacy and format details.

Install

One command installs MagicDispel and everything it needs. It uses uv, which brings its own Python when the system has none that fits, and ends by showing the MagicDispel logo.

macOS and Linux:

curl -LsSf https://raw.githubusercontent.com/v1nc3nt-continualab/magicdispel/main/install.sh | sh

Windows (PowerShell):

powershell -ExecutionPolicy ByPass -c "irm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/v1nc3nt-continualab/magicdispel/main/install.ps1 | iex"

If magicdispel is not found afterwards, open a new terminal window.

Already using uv or pipx (Python 3.10 or newer):

uv tool install magicdispel
pipx install magicdispel

To update, run the install command again, or uv tool upgrade magicdispel. To remove MagicDispel, run uv tool uninstall magicdispel.

ExifTool is optional: when version 12.73 or newer is installed, MagicDispel uses it to double-check every result. Install it with brew install exiftool, sudo apt install libimage-exiftool-perl or winget install --exact --id OliverBetz.ExifTool.

Usage

magicdispel --check
magicdispel --version
magicdispel photo.jpg screenshot.png portrait.heic
magicdispel --anonymous photo.jpg
magicdispel --keep-name "Screenshot 2026-09-23 at 15.14.15.png"
magicdispel -- "-filename-starts-with-a-dash.jpg"

Quote paths containing spaces, or drag the files into the terminal. On Windows, drag-and-drop depends on the terminal; a quoted path always works. Folders are not processed recursively. Run magicdispel on its own to see the logo and how to use it. If ExifTool is installed somewhere unusual, set MAGICDISPEL_EXIFTOOL to its full path.

Exit codes: 0 success or help, 1 one or more files not cleaned, 2 invalid arguments, 130 interrupted. A failed file does not stop the rest of a batch.

Formats

Variants that cannot be rebuilt safely, such as BigTIFF, fragmented image sequences or unknown HEIF item types, are refused rather than passed through. Images up to 268 megapixels are checked (enough for 200-megapixel phone photos); larger ones are refused.

Development

python -m venv .venv
# Activate the environment for your shell.
python -m pip install -e ".[test]" build
python -m unittest discover -s tests -v
python -m build

The tests need only Pillow. When ExifTool is installed, they also add metadata the way other programs write it and let ExifTool double-check each result; CI runs them both ways. No personal photos are included.

Before and after any change to the cleaning code, run the regression harness over a folder of real sample photos kept outside the repository:

python scripts/make_probes.py ~/magicdispel-corpus    # adds synthetic leak probes
python scripts/regression.py ~/magicdispel-corpus     # saves a run under runs/
python scripts/regression.py ~/magicdispel-corpus --baseline ~/magicdispel-corpus/runs/<run>.json

It checks that every output looks identical to its input (Pillow, and macOS ImageIO/ColorSync when available), that no probe marker survives, and, against a baseline, that no sample changes outcome or gains metadata. Pure refactors should also pass --identical, and --without-exiftool checks the path users without ExifTool take.

.github/workflows/test.yml runs the tests on macOS, Windows and Linux with Python 3.10 and 3.13, with and without ExifTool, and the install scripts on all three. release.yml publishes a tagged version to PyPI once those pass.

License and attribution

MagicDispel is MIT licensed. ExifTool, an optional companion, is developed by Phil Harvey and distributed separately under its own license. MagicDispel is not affiliated with ExifTool.