Show of hands. How many of us upload or share photos with others? If not unanimous among Mac and iPhone users, the percentage will be high, right. Why? Taking photos is an inexpensive, almost thoughtless, and trivial action. Our phones take most of our photos these days and thanks to digital cameras which are everywhere the price of a photo has dropped to almost nothing. Plus, sharing options are numerous and growing; email, messages, Facebook, Instagram, blogs, Flickr, and hundreds more make it easy to share.
Every digital photo also comes with what is known as EXIF data which is embedded into the photo and this data is extensive and revealing. For example, EXIF data can describe to anyone the camera maker and model, date and time of the photos, compression used, aperture, and in many cases, where the photo was taken.
Uh oh. See a problem there? That means anyone who wants to check out your online photos has access to information about the device you used to take the photo and where it was taken. Can you get rid of EXIF data?
It’ll set you back a few bucks but Remove Photo EXIF does just exactly that. One photo after another or in batch mode. Drag and drop a folder full of photos and Remove Photo EXIF removes the EXIF data but leaves the photo intact.
The same developer has another app which gives you tools to edit EXIF metadata in a photo (handy for photos with the wrong creation date and time). It’s called EXIF Editor.
But these are not the only Mac apps which zap EXIF metadata from photos. One I use frequently is called Photo Zapper (which does not really zap photos, and maybe should be renamed to something more like EXIF Zapper) and it works much the same way. Drag and drop.
The value to removing EXIF metadata from a photo should be obvious. Unscrupulous web crawlers can learn something about you and your photo shooting habits with ease. Likewise, it’s not a wise idea to post photos on Facebook or other social media while you’re on vacation and using a photo gallery to tell everyone in the world that you’re on vacation.