Many image formats support so called metadata which are shunks of information stored in the image file itself. This can include the digital camera model used to take the images, time and date the picture was taken or GPS information that tell anyone where the image was taken. Metadata takes up disk space, this can be a few bytes to Kilobytes per image which can accumulate to Megabytes easily.
Privacy interested users, those who want to save up disk space or those who simply do not need the metadata an use a software like JPEG & PNG Stripper to remove the metadata from the images. The portable software has a size of 77 Kilobytes. It comes with a graphical user interface that can be used to drag and drop images or folders containing images into it. A few options on the top configure the output and some other information.
The program will automatically scan all image files that have been dropped into the interface and remove the metadata from those images. It will verbose the name, status and size gain of each individual file and generate a report in the end that lists the total amount of images files, the size, the number of files with removed metadata and the total free space gain thanks to the operation.
A test folder with 6000 images and a size of about 557 Megabytes could be reduced by 18 Megabytes using the software program. The program can also be run from the command line which makes it an excellent choice for batch scripts, say removing metadata of all new image files before moving them to another location.
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HA! Just thinking of this. Imagine you take some photo’s of your household. Then you publish them on your blog or Flicker or wherever. Thief likes what he sees, gets the GPS coordinates from the photo’s and then burglarizes your house. Now that’s hacking! :)
It doesn’t unzip correctly (W7)
The downside of this tool is that it won’t allows you to selectively remove different hidden data types (Exif, IPTC, XMP) like the free BatchPurifier LITE and the ex-free Exif Tag Remover.
Unfortunately, the download at the link above is infected with a virus! It won’t even open without my virus protection software popping up a warning!!! Be careful! :)
The warning that you get is likely a false positive. Virus Total shows 4/43 which means only four see it as malicious out of 43 engines. Contact your antivirus company if you want to be sure.
Nice post Martin, I have not tried this software yet, as I normally write my own with Python. Word of advice for all readers clear all your personal image data before posting it on any public domain. lots of data is hidden from your eyes and is readable in your image source for example the thumbnail of the original image, even you crop, resize or edit the image still the full thumb can be visible in many cases and that is not all.
This is the robot and crawlers world people should be very thoughtful about their personal data.