A common problem faced by celebrities and other media personalities is that they reveal their exact location due to the metadata embedded in the photos they share online. Many publishing programs and hosting services can remove these details automatically, but a simple oversight is enough to expose you. If you want to delete the metadata information of a photo or a whole package of images, the new Photo Anonymizer will help you.
Sometimes it is an excellent idea to incorporate secondary data into a photograph, starting with the original date and the exact location. That helps us create a sense of provenance , a solid reference for anyone who sees the image in the future. In the digital world, almost everything is volatile, and it doesn’t take long for images to lose their context, to the point of being misattributed or used with an incorrect technical profile.
However, that secondary data, that ” metadata “, can cause a headache … or something more serious. The home of Adam Savage (the same one from Hunters of Myths ) was exposed to the network in 2010. Something similar happened to John McAfee in Guatemala at the end of 2012 when he was captured , and one of the objectives of the NSA’s XKeyscore program is collect metadata on images. So if you think you need to improve your privacy and you need to delete the metadata information of a photo , start with Photo Anonymizer .
Photo Anonymizer: How to erase metadata information from a photo
The main menu. Only English and German for now.
The program is only available in English and German, but this does not cause any problems. One of the best aspects of Photo Anonymizer not only works with the EXIF standard (the most popular) , but also reaches similar systems such as DICOM (medicine) and IPTC (press) . Another interesting option is to limit your purge only to geolocation data, and finally, to eliminate alternative data streams (eg, the download link) .
The program removes much more than EXIF
The rest is a matter of looking for the photos to be processed, selecting them, and confirming the actions of the program. When using the first option “Remove Metadata” , Photo Anonymizer asks us which tags to remove, with the possibility of keeping the capture date, and the type of orientation. Anonymizing a single image is almost instantaneous, but if you need to process thousands of photos, you have to wait a bit.
Select the photos, and wait
In the settings menu, Photo Anonymizer offers three parameters: Keep the timestamps of the photo, add a text string to the processed images, or save them in a different destination folder. The program works with all editions of Windows starting from XP. Your registration is optional, and free.
