Too many times I have seen comments from people complaining that other people are downloading their images and steeling their prompts. This is obviously not fair play and your work should be protected, you can take steps to remove the metadata from your externally generated images before uploading to civitai.com, but you will need to manually enter all your metadata including prompt when posting images to civitai.com there are image setting which allow you to hide the prompt, the combination of these 2 steps will mean your prompt will remain private and hidden.

Setting up FFMPEG:

Installing FFMPEG on MacOS:

Open your Terminal and enter these commands:

xcode-select --install

# install Homebrew first if needed
/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

brew doctor
brew install ffmpeg
ffmpeg -version

If ffmpeg or brew says “command not found,” check Homebrew’s prefix with brew --prefix.
On Apple Silicon Macs, Homebrew typically lives under /opt/homebrew, while Intel Macs typically use /usr/local, so your shell PATH needs the matching bin directory.
For zsh, that usually means adding either export PATH="/opt/homebrew/bin:$PATH" or export PATH="/usr/local/bin:$PATH" to ~/.zshrc, then running source ~/.zshrc.

Installing FFMPEG on Linux:

Installation on Ubuntu or other Debian based system:

Open your Terminal and enter these commands:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install ffmpeg
ffmpeg -version

Installation on Fedora or other Redhat based system:

Open your Terminal and enter these commands:

sudo dnf install \
  https://mirrors.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm \
  https://mirrors.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm

sudo dnf install ffmpeg
ffmpeg -version

RPM Fusion is commonly used because the full FFmpeg build is distributed there rather than in Fedora’s default package set. If Fedora reports package conflicts with ffmpeg-free, switch to the RPM Fusion build with sudo dnf swap ffmpeg-free ffmpeg --allowerasing

Running the FFMPEG strip metadata script:

Download the attached ffmpeg-strip-metadata.zip file and extract it, open your terminal and change directory to the location you extracted the file ffmpeg-stript-metadata.sh

You may need to grant execute permissions

sudo chmod +x ./ffmpeg-strip-metadata.sh

Run the script like this:

./ffmpeg-strip-metadata.sh --inputImage /path/to/input.png --outputImagePath /path/to/output.png