If an image/cover art is added to a flac file using
metaflac --import-picture-from="/tmp/del/image_jpg.jpg" "/tmp/del/test.flac"
I can delete all metadata from a flac file using
metaflac --remove-all-tags "/tmp/del/test.flac"
But the image remains how can I also delete all cover art?
PS: I looked here https://www.systutorials.com/docs/linux/man/1-metaflac/
These two commands should remove the cover art.
metaflac --remove --block-type=PICTURE,PADDING --dont-use-padding /tmp/album/*.flac
metaflac --remove-tag=COVERART --dont-use-padding /tmp/album/*.flac
Note that --dont-use-padding tells vorbis not to replace the image data with padding, so the command really is:
--remove--block-type (what to remove, doesn't work as expected unless you also use the next argument)--dont-use-padding (tells Vorbis not to replace what was removed with padding)This was very counter-intuitive, first, why would Vorbis leave padding in place of an image when you remove it? That's some old idea Vorbis group had about keeping the size of the file after a removal the same, roughly. And why would you need to tell it to not replace image data with padding when you are already telling it to remove padding, but that's how it works. I think. For some reason, the remove PADDING item does not appear to do that, unless you use --dont-use-padding as well, which seems kind of silly, but that's what my tests showed, I tested pretty heavily and this is what I ended up with that seemed robust and consistent.
This was verified while doing intensive testing on a Vorbis tagging/image embedding feature for some software, during this testing, the FLAC files kept getting bigger and bigger, and I couldn't figure out why, but that's what was going on.
Note that PADDING in Vorbis FLAC files as far as I can tell works roughly the same way Thunderbird email clients have their email 'directory' files, which contain the emails in a single large file. If you delete or move emails from one 'directory' (aka, file), you have to then use the 'Compact Folders' feature to get rid of the space taken up by the moved or deleted emails. FLAC files work roughly the same way as far as I can tell, you can keep adding to the COMMENT type items, but it doesn't remove any padding unless you force it to.
