Not a huge deal, but for the sake of understanding what's going on to avoid future problems...
I'd like to know why the file size of a jpg is going up after the exif data is removed. I thought it was supposed to go down?
from PIL import Image
image = Image.open(fname)
name, ext = get_fname_ext(fname)
out_name = name + '_cleaned' + ext
out_abs = output_dir + "\\" + out_name
image.save(out_abs)
Filesize before: 192.65 KB
Filesize after: 202.46 KB
Difference: +9.82 KB
What happens here is that PIL recompresses the image (the source is a JPG, but it doesn't have to, so it's treated as image data). It would be safer/easier to rely on an external tool like exiftool, imagemagick or jpegtran. The answers on this related SO question might be a good resource.
As an PIL-only alternative, you might try if the python snippet from this answer works for you:
from PIL import Image
image = Image.open('image_file.jpeg')
# next 3 lines strip exif
data = list(image.getdata())
image_without_exif = Image.new(image.mode, image.size)
image_without_exif.putdata(data)
image_without_exif.save('image_file_without_exif.jpeg')
