You may have realised I have started to add some images of sunsets! I recently reviewed the content of my posts and realised I have not fulfilled one of the earlier goals: to upload pictures of sunsets or nature at all! I have now hence made the changes, and they are now ready to go!
Each week on Sunday you will see a new image posted out. I will continue to post one out until I run out of pictures of sunsets, or I run out of nature images… 😅
Feel free to use the images in any shape or form (this is your permission to do so)! These images are all taken across various places throughout the years on my phone. Majority have been cropped, not edited. I decided to crop them into squares to potentially trigger a pet peeve in some of you. You will never know if it is a landscape or portrait image! More importantly, I have also used it to remove metadata.
What is metadata?
Metadata is data about the data itself. It does not talk about the contents of the data itself, but the attributes surrounding the data. A simple example you can think of is whenever you look at the properties of any file on your computer, you will see metadata about the file such as Created, Modified, and Last Opened fields. That is data describing the data itself, known as metadata. Depending on the file type and system you are using, different metadata fields can be collected.
When we talk about images, it contains a lot of metadata. Usually you can view this in your phone gallery app by selecting more information about the image. Depending on how you have configured your permissions on your camera application, it can contain location data as well. If you are considering sharing an image to others, like me right now, you might want to consider removing the metadata in your photo. This will strip any valuable information that may decrease your privacy and in turn, could be used against you.
How to remove metadata for images?
One of the simplest tools out there is ExifTool. It is an awesome metadata tool created by Phil Harvey. ExifTool allows you to read, write and create metadata values across a wide range of file formats. Do check if the file format is supported by ExifTool here. This tool does require a command line.
To use remove metadata for images, simply run the following command:
exiftool -all= <filename>
If you are not familiar with command line tools, there is a wide range of programs with a GUI interface that will do the same job. A tool you can use is exifcleaner that should do the same job. I have not used this previously, but it appears to be based off elements of Exiftool.
Other methods
If you are editing images on Photoshop or GIMP, you can select to remove EXIF or metadata values when you export your images. A rudimentary, but efficient method to remove metadata is to simply take a screenshot of your images. This will remove all the metadata on the image itself. Sometimes it is possible to simply remove the metadata by deleting fields in the property fields of the file from your file explorer. This won’t necessarily work all the time, but it can be achieved with some success.
You might be wondering why I haven’t mentioned any online metadata remover tools. That is mainly out of an abundance of privacy concern. We do not know how the service online manages, handles and processes our data. It is hard to determine if they keep and store our data or how it is deleted and managed on their end. If you really need to, or accept the risk that you might lose some privacy or sensitivity by sending your data to an unknown untrusted third party, you are welcome to use them.
There are many tools out there that will read, modify or strip metadata on files for you. It is always important to note that most files will still need some form of metadata to function properly. Not all values can be removed. It’s just like hitting Allow Necessary Cookies Only whenever your visit a new website. You require some cookies for the website to function. You require some metadata on the files to function properly. We can reduce metadata to only the necessary fields and remove any additional metadata.