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Shredding files

Photos quietly carry GPS, camera model, and timestamps. Handy for your own archive, bad for a public Discord post. Shred lets you look, strip, and, when you mean it, delete.

The flow I use

blackhole shred analyze photo.jpg
# 40/100 photo.jpg tags=['GPSInfo', 'Model', 'DateTimeOriginal']

blackhole shred clean photo.jpg
# cleaned -> photo.cleaned.jpg, verify=PASS

blackhole shred verify photo.cleaned.jpg; echo $?
# PASS ... sensitive=[]

blackhole shred shred secret.txt --passes 3 --yes

Rules I stuck to:

  • clean never edits in place. It writes *.cleaned.* next to the original so you can't nuke the only copy by typo.
  • verify is script-friendly: exit 0 clean, 1 dirty.
  • shred overwrites (1, 3 or 7 passes), renames a few times to hide the name, then unlinks. SSDs can't promise much here - encryption plus shred is the honest combo - but spinning disks are properly gone.

Formats

JPEG, PNG, WebP, TIFF EXIF is fully stripped via Pillow. DOCX core props and PDF author fields are reported; PDFs are copied with a note of what's left rather than a false promise. Use a dedicated redaction tool for legal-grade PDFs.

Watch out

clean strips metadata, not malware. Don't open files you don't trust just because they're clean.