A fairly common problem faced by celebrities and other media figures is that they reveal their exact location due to the metadata embedded in the photographs they share online. Many editing programs and hosting services can automatically remove those details, but a simple oversight is enough to be left exposed. If you want to delete the metadata information from a photograph or a whole batch of images, the new Photo Anonymizer will help you.
In certain cases, it's an excellent idea to add secondary data to a photograph, starting with the original date and exact location. That helps 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 images quickly lose their context, to the point of being incorrectly attributed or used with a wrong technical profile.
However, those secondary data, those "metadata", can cause a headache... or something more serious. Adam Savage's house (the same one from MythBusters) was exposed to the internet in 2010. Something similar happened to John McAfee in Guatemala in late 2012, when he was captured, and one of the objectives of the NSA's XKeyscore program is to collect metadata from images. So if you think you need to improve your privacy and need to delete the metadata information from a photograph, start with Photo Anonymizer.
Photo Anonymizer: How to Delete Metadata Information from a Photograph
The program is only available in English and German, but this is not a problem. One of the best aspects of Photo Anonymizer is that it doesn't work only with the EXIF standard (the most popular), but also covers similar systems like DICOM (medicine) and IPTC (press). Another interesting option is limiting its purge only to geolocation data, and finally, removing alternative data streams (e.g., the download link).
The rest is a matter of finding the photographs to process, selecting them, and confirming the program's actions. When using the first option "Remove Metadata", Photo Anonymizer asks you which tags to remove, with the possibility of keeping the capture date and the orientation type. Anonymizing a single image is almost instantaneous, but if you need to process thousands of photographs, you'll have to wait a bit.
In the configuration menu, Photo Anonymizer offers three parameters: keep the photo's timestamps, add a text string to the processed images, or save them to a different destination folder. The program works with all editions of Windows from XP onward. Its registration is optional and free.
Official site and download: Click here
