hush: strip metadata before you post

hush@workshop: ~/src/hush

hush --version

hush 0.9.3 (build 2026-07-14, MIT-0)
A command-line tool that strips metadata out of photos before they leave your machine.

cat README

Every phone camera writes more into a JPEG than the picture. The GPS fix, the serial number of the body, the timestamp down to the second, and on some phones the name you gave the device. Social sites strip most of it on upload. Anything you send as a file attachment keeps all of it.

hush reads a photo, drops every EXIF, XMP, IPTC and ICC block it does not need, and writes the pixels back out untouched. It never recompresses. A file that goes in at quality 92 comes out at quality 92, a few kilobytes lighter.

It runs on one file, a directory, or whatever your shell hands it on stdin. It has no config file, no daemon and no update checker.

hush --help

-o, --out DIRpathwrite cleaned copies here instead of in place -r, --recursiveflagwalk subdirectories -k, --keep TAGlistkeep these tags, for example Orientation,ColorSpace -n, --dry-runflagprint what would change and exit -j, --jobs Ninthow many files at once, default is one per core --jsonflagmachine-readable report on stdout -q, --quietflagsay nothing unless something fails

Orientation is kept by default. Dropping it turns half the photos on a phone sideways.

hush -n ~/Pictures/roll-14

roll-14/IMG_0091.jpg   GPS 48.14, 17.11   Apple iPhone 14   -18.4 kB
roll-14/IMG_0092.jpg   GPS 48.14, 17.11   Apple iPhone 14   -18.1 kB
roll-14/IMG_0093.jpg   no GPS             Apple iPhone 14    -9.6 kB
roll-14/scan-A.tif     XMP history (7)    Epson V600        -41.2 kB

4 files, 87.3 kB of metadata, nothing written (dry run)

ls releases/

0.9.32026-07-14TIFF support, and a fix for HEIC files written by iOS 18 0.9.02026-04-02--jobs, --json, and a rewrite of the JPEG segment walker 0.8.12025-11-20stopped clobbering the ICC profile on CMYK JPEGs 0.8.02025-10-05first release with PNG and WebP

Signed tarballs and the signing key live in the repository. Every release is reproducible from a clean checkout.

cat INSTALL

# macOS and Linux, from source
git clone https://example.org/hush.git
cd hush && make && sudo make install

# or grab a static binary
curl -LO https://example.org/hush/0.9.3/hush-x86_64-linux
sha256sum -c hush-0.9.3.sums

Building needs a C11 compiler and make. No package manager, no build system to install first. On a cold machine the whole thing compiles in about four seconds.

cat docs/limits.md

hush does not touch the pixels, so it cannot help with anything the pixels give away. A window in the background is still a window in the background.

It does not know about video. MP4 and MOV carry their own creation dates and location atoms, and handling them properly means a second parser that has not been written yet.

Some cameras write maker notes with offsets that point into the rest of the file. hush drops those blocks whole rather than editing them, which is why a Nikon NEF comes out of it smaller than you expect.

nostr feed --kind note --limit 4

cat CONTRIBUTING

Patches by email, plain diff or git format-patch, either is fine. Bug reports want the camera model and a file that shows the problem. If you cannot share the photo, run with --json and send the report instead, it has the segment layout and no image data.