How to Protect Your Privacy When Uploading Photos

Written by: Mark Muller • Edited by: Bill Bunter
Updated Oct 24, 2011 • Related Guides: Windows | Windows Vista

Protecting your privacy when uploading photos essentially means deleting, or editing the image’s meta information. Here’s all you need to view, delete or edit your photos meta information including useful tips & tools.

What is Photo Meta Data?

Today’s digital cameras store information about the photos along with the digital images. In addition to images properties such as dimensions and bit depth can cameras write information like camera serial numbers, date and time of photos etc. In fact some images even store information such as the photographers address or an image’s GPS location. On Windows system you can view your photos meta information in the Details tab of the Properties menu.

By removing the meta information before uploading your photos you protect your privacy. The tools I am going to show you do not alter the quality of your photos.

How to Remove Photo Meta Data

If you just want to remove photo meta data I recommend you download JPEG & PNG Stripper which operates on JPG/JPEG/JFIF & PNG photos. The executable named stripper.exe works on Windows operating systems without installation, and you can remove your images’ meta information by dragging the photo in the applications GUI. If you want to bulk-remove meta data from photos you can run JPEG & PNG Stripper in command line mode.

A note to users of Windows Vista: Vista displays a Remove Properties and Personal Information feature in the photo’s properties details tab. When I tested it in one of its two modes (create a copy with all possible properties removed) it failed to remove some meta information – in contrast to stripper.exe shown above.

How to Edit Photo Meta Data

Those looking to edit photo meta (EXIF, XMP and IPTC) information data can download free Microsoft Pro Photo Tools 2 or try before you buy Picture Information Extractor 5.2. In rare cases of photos being in the PNG format you can google free Image-ExifTool-7.67 or TweakPNG to view or change meta information stored in Microsoft’s proprietary image file format PNG which neither Pro Photo Tools 2 nor Picture Information Extractor 5.2 seem to support.

The Bottom Line

For the sake of simplicity I would stick with JPEG & PNG Stripper if possible. In any case, before uploading your photos you should check that the tool of your choosing does what it is supposed to do by right-clicking the photo and looking for meta information in the details tab.

Last but no least: Before uploading photos I would also consider shrinking the quality and inserting a watermark to protect your copyright.

References

Author's own experience

Deaconous Apr 15, 2011 2:57 AM

Pixelgarde

I use Pixelgarde Photo Privacy Editor. It's free and works for iPhone, Android and PC. You can selectively remove GPS, Dates, Etc., without changing the originals. It also has a watermark and let's you resize before uploading.

kensingtonabida Dec 22, 2010 8:33 AM

JPEG & PNG Stripper

I used the JPEG & PNG Stripper as suggested to remove meta data from my photos, and it worked perfectly. I'm glad I came across this useful post. Thank you.

ELT May 19, 2010 8:37 AM

Selectively removing EXIF, XMP, and others

JPEG & PNG Stripper is a good tool to remove all metadata from JPEG and PNG files. But sometimes there is a need to remove metadata selectively. Free tools such as jStrip - http://davidcrowell.com/jstrip/ and BatchPurifier LITE - http://www.digitalconfidence.com/downloads.html are able to do that.