This ended up being some boilerplate I had to put into all my django-imagekit forks' model fields' functions that got called on pre_save/post_save signals.

I-smell-an-abstraction-layer-in-here-guys.py

    
    def clear_exif_data(self, **kwargs): # signal, sender, instance
        """
        Stores ICC profile data in the field before saving, and refreshes
        the profile hash if an ICCHashField has been specified.
    
        """
        instance = kwargs.get('instance')
    
        logg.info("--- Clearing exif metadata from %s.%s %s" % (
            instance.__class__.__name__, self.name, instance.id))
        setattr(instance, self.name, None)
    
        # save if sent asynchronously
        dequeue_runmode = kwargs.get('dequeue_runmode', None)
        enqueue_runmode = kwargs.get('enqueue_runmode', None)
        if dequeue_runmode is not None:
            if not dequeue_runmode == enqueue_runmode:
                if dequeue_runmode == signalqueue.SQ_RUNMODES['SQ_ASYNC_DAEMON']:
                    instance.save_base()