A Picture's Worth A Thousand Words

And Then Some

Published on February 10, 2009 By PoSmedley In Living in Cyberspace

(From Sam Terrapin's Blog at Skinartistry)

The next time you post a picture to the world wide web, you may want to ask yourself if that's all your posting. There's all that METaDATA that is attached to it as well.

For Windows only comes JPEG & PNG Stripper an extremely small portable application that strips the metadata out of JPEG and PNG image files.

From Lifehacker
"Why would you want to strip down an image file? Ask former TechTV host Cat Schwartz, who in 2003 received a rather embarrassing lesson in the power of metadata. In short, a cropped headshot posted on her blog contained an embedded, full-pic thumbnail with, well, a lot more than just a head and shoulders. Even if you're not cropping your mug out of a nude composition, there are others reasons you'd want to remove the metadata from an image. All sorts of information—like exposure time, aperture settings, camera used, and GPS coordinates—can potentially be embedded into an image."

As much as I work with stock images, I had no idea how much info was being stored in those images. GPS coordinates?!?! In order to verify all of this, I ran a little test that you can try to. I cropped an image and went to Camera Summary.com. I uploaded the cropped picture and let it do it's thing and show me all the MetaData. You can click on the results below for a larger image.

Not only did it pull the thumbnail out of the original image, it listed everything else. AND this picture was taken on my cell phone! Who knew my little cell phone camera stored so much info?! My cell phone did not list the GPS, but some cameras do.

The good news is there is JPEG & PNG Stripper to remove that data and it's FREE. (I love FREE software). The even better news is that you may already have software that will do the same thing.

While cropping my image, I discovered that Faststone Image Viewer will remove the Metadata as well. I tested it and uploaded the image to Camera Summary.com and the Metadata was gone, including the thumbnail.

So, there you have it. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a few cropped pics of Lois Griffin I need to check for Metadata. Hubba-Hubba!

Comments (Page 1)

DrJBHL

on Feb 10, 2009

Thanks very much, Po'! Once in a very long while a Post like this comes along. Succinct, useful and with high community value and usefulness. The self portrait was a nice touch, too.

Lantec

on Feb 10, 2009

good info, Thanks

angus1949

on Feb 10, 2009

Thanks Po, good to know.

sydneysiders

on Feb 10, 2009

Thanks Po, good to know.

ditto....thanks....

foreverserenity

on Feb 10, 2009

Thanks, very informative!

ZubaZ

on Feb 10, 2009

ZubaZ starts editing metadata!!!!

DrJBHL

on Feb 10, 2009

Zubaz

reply 6

Zubaz starts editing metadata!!!!

Too late. Bwah hah hah!

PoSmedley

on Feb 10, 2009

I'm glad if any one found it useful. Thanks.

sydneysiders

on Feb 10, 2009

yep...definitely useful...I remember the 2003 case well....and after that for awhile, anytime I sent cropped pictures that I definitely did not want uncropped...for various reasons.....Cat's reason not included... .....would print screen and crop it.... .....figured that would get rid of all the data....

Tailsgirl

on Feb 28, 2009

Only just saw this topic, awesome find Po!

PuterDudeJim

on Feb 28, 2009

teddybearcholla

on Apr 07, 2009

Excellent post, Po!!!!

PoSmedley

on Apr 08, 2009

Thanks, teddybearcholla

teddybearcholla

on Apr 13, 2009

Welcome PoSmedley!

messiah1

on Apr 13, 2009

That's a handy piece of information there. My posting here will mark this thread for me so I can find this when I crop a picture of Zubaz's head from the larger picture of his dead, striped carcass.

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