We are all having at least a digital camera or a few latest smartphone or tablet PCs capable of taking stunning photos. Most of the time we share these photos with our friends and family members through social networking sites. But most people might not have any idea about the EXIF metadata associated with the picture. This EXIF metadata can store details about the camera you used, it’s manufacturer, model, model number, camera settings used (aperture, shutter,etc.) and software that you used to edit or modify the photographs. Photos taken from the new digital cameras and mobile cameras may contain your geographic location details. Through the geographic coordinates, one can find the exact location where the shot was taken. Modern cameras all have the GPS functionality, which may include the exact geographic coordinates of the place from where you take the shots.
The Exchangeable image file format, popularly known as EXIF, is a standard that specifies formats for images, sound, and ancillary tags used by digital cameras, smartphones, scanners and other systems and the EXIF data is embedded within the image file itself.. There are some ways to see the EXIF metadata. If you are using windows you can see the metadata by simply selecting an image, the associated metadata information will be displayed at the bottom pane of the windows explorer. You can also use online and offline EXIF metadata viewers like EXIF viewer, Google Picasa, Windows Live Photo Gallery, Flickr and other photo viewer programs. You can use the Faststone image viewer to see the metadata. You can remove metadata using the free FastStone image viewer, it has an option to remove EXIF/IPTC data from the photographs. IrfanView is also a nice photo viewer, you can also delete the EXIF with a little command-line. DropIt can be used to remove EXIF in batch.To remove the metadata using Irfanview from an individual image or multiple images click the “Save as” item or “Batch Conversion/Rename” item under the “File” menu. You can also use the free utility QuickFix to clean the metadata.
You can remove EXIF metadata using Adobe Bridge or Adobe Photoshop. There is a free tool available for it, JPEG & PNG Stripper to easily remove all EXIF data from your photos. This is a nice tool for stripping, cleaning, removing unnecessary metadata from JPG, JPEG, JFIF & PNG files. The image quality is not affected. It includes command line support. MetaStripper is a simple application to remove EXIF data. This is a free utility to remove meta information (EXIF, COM and IPTC tags) from JPEG image files. You can automatically process a large number of files with the click of a button. BatchPurifier LITE is a free edition of BatchPurifier that can remove metadata from JPEG picture files in batch. EXIF Eraser is a free lightweight software that allows you to easily and effectively delete entire EXIF/IPTC/XMP information from image files. You can also do it in windows explorer without any tools. To do this first, select all the images that you want to wipe metadata, right click and choose Properties. Select the details tab and click “Remove Properties and Personal Information” link. This will give you an option to remove the metadata information that automatically gets stored in the images itself in the form of EXIF (Exchangeable Image File).
To edit and remove EXIF data, you can use GeoSetter, a freeware tool for Windows (XP or higher) for showing and changing geo data and other metadata (IPTC/XMP/EXIF) of image files. If you are a professional photographer who is working with tons of photos can consider the professional tool ExifCleaner. You can select images either individually, or you can load an entire folder, next decide what gets wiped and what doesn’t. Then click on “clean setup”. There you will be able to state that everything gets wiped or just selective EXIF details. This is a nice feature, as many professional photographers want to keep their camera models and exposure settings with the image. By the time this tool can delete the personal sensitive information like geographical location data, etc. But to get this power you must spend $19 for the software.
