strip

Remove metadata (EXIF, GPS, ICC, XMP) — losslessly for jpeg/png, by re-encoding for webp.

Remove metadata from an image.

strip <inputs...> [--reencode] # lossless container surgery for jpeg/png; webp needs --reencode; heic: convert --to-format jpeg first

Flags

Flag	Meaning
`--reencode`	required for webp; refused outright for heic. Not needed (and does nothing extra) for jpeg/png.

How this differs by source format

jpeg and png are stripped losslessly — container surgery only. No decode, no re-encode, no pixel touched, so --reencode is neither required nor meaningful for these two; the bytes that weren’t metadata are untouched.

webp has no lossless metadata-strip path in this engine, so strip on a webp source without --reencode is a usage error (exit 2) rather than a silent no-op or a fabricated “success” that left the metadata in place. Pass --reencode to explicitly opt into an ordinary re-encode-to-self job instead.

heic is refused outright, with or without --reencode. HEIC is decode-only in this engine and can never be an output format — every other command’s --format keep falls back a HEIC source to JPEG, and routing strip --reencode through that same fallback would silently hand back a JPEG under a command named strip. Instead of guessing at a format you never asked for, the tool says so and points you at convert:

strip: heic is decode-only and can never be an output format, so strip cannot re-encode it --
run 'imagekbreducer convert <file> --to-format jpeg' first, then strip the jpeg

avif is not special-cased the way heic is — --reencode on an avif source builds an ordinary “re-encode to itself” job, same as webp. It’s the engine, not this command, that then refuses it with unsupported-format (exit 20): the wasm backend this CLI ships bundles no AVIF encoder. That is a real engine limitation reported honestly, not a usage mistake this command invents a story for.

Examples

imagekbreducer strip photo.jpg

imagekbreducer strip photo.heic
# strip: heic is decode-only and can never be an output format, so strip cannot re-encode it --
# run 'imagekbreducer convert <file> --to-format jpeg' first, then strip the jpeg
imagekbreducer convert photo.heic --to-format jpeg
imagekbreducer strip photo-compressed.jpg

imagekbreducer strip banner.webp --reencode

What can go wrong

Exit	When
2	webp without `--reencode`; heic, with or without `--reencode`
3	an input doesn’t exist, or a glob matched nothing
4	the computed output already exists and isn’t the input
20	`unsupported-format` — avif with `--reencode` (no AVIF encoder in this backend)
21, 24	other engine-side failures on the `--reencode` re-encode path

strip has no --to flag and no --format flag: it either preserves the source’s own format (jpeg/png, and webp/avif with --reencode) or refuses. targetBytes in the --json envelope is always null.