Protect your photo privacy when uploading to Internet

Your digital photo hold all sort of information, you no doubt know what that you can find the date and time taken, date modified and exposure information in your photo’s metadata, you might also know that your photo can tell what make and model of camera you used and even the lens and flash, but you might also be storing your name, your home address and other private or potentially embarrassing information in those files as well all of which other people can see if you post the photos online.

Photo Metadata
Quite a lot of information is lurking around inside your photos more than you might know, you can uncover all that metadata either in windows itself or through a photo organizer, if you use Windows Vista, for example right click a photo and choose properties, then click the details tab, and you should see much of the metadata that is packed into your photo, photo organizers often arrange the same information in a more attractive way.

Most of that information is pretty innocuous, the shutter speed and aperture setting of your camera, no big deal, but what if you use a GPS device to geolocate your photos, than can be handy, but you might not want to upload the GPS location of your own web, keywords and tags can also be tricky, at least potentially, tag your photo instead of organizing them by folder, unless you happen to use embarrassing keywords, if you tagged photos of relative, friend or co-worker with a snarky nickname, for example, don’t forget that if you upload the picture to a photo-sharing web site, the tag usually uploads with it, too, so any one who looks at your pictures of the boss will be able to see that you tagged him.

Protect your private info
If you have metadata your might not want to share with the world, fear not, it’s easy to strip personal information out of your image files before you upload them to the internet, you can remove all of photo’s metadata using JPEG & PNG stripper utility, nothing more than windows itself, if you have Vista, just go back to the detail tab of the properties dialog box, at the bottom of the window, you should see a link that says “Remove properties and personal information”, click it and windows will strip all the metadata away from the photo, you can even select several images and do this to all of them at the same time, if you don’t have Vista or you want an even easier metadata removal method, try a program JPEG & PNG Stripper, this is a free utility, to use it just drag your photo files to the stripper window and the app instantly erases the metadata.

If you use either of these methods to delete metadata, it will be gone forever, so you’ll probably wish to remove metadata only from the copy of the photo that you plan to upload or share, don’t do it to the copy you’re keeping on your computer unless you are sure you’ll never want to search for it by tag or lookup the exposure information ever again.