It’s a fine day, and you’ve had a blast visiting your long-time top bucket-list place. And now, you are about to share your celebration pics on social media to express how much fun you had hanging out with your loved ones. But did you know that you might share more than the details about the food you had or the places you visited?
Images taken from the phone or digital camera have valuable information like the date and time of the photo taken, your GPS location, which device you took the picture from, and the editing software used to modify the image attached. Now you wouldn’t want to display them in full glory for hackers to steal and commit cybercrimes against you, isn’t it? So the best way to avoid it is by removing the metadata attached to your images.
And so, in this blog, we will focus on how you can remove metadata from photos in simple steps.
Why Should You Remove Image Metadata?
Digital photos can disclose more information than what they showcase in the picture! The information attached to your pictures, often called image metadata or EXIF (exchangeable image file format), can negatively affect your virtual safety and privacy whenever you upload your photos on the internet. And since this data is often invisible to us, we stay entirely oblivious to their presence and don’t realize how much information we disclose about ourselves on different virtual platforms.
Whether it be Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, et, these companies can quickly harvest vast amounts of data from your photos and share them on other platforms, thus putting your security in danger. Anyone downloading these images can trace out your metadata and find where you live, what device you use, where you work, and much more.
Moreover, even the company whose device you are using can use data from your pictures and store them on their servers without your permission. They can even sell the same for marketing purposes and allow the leak, hacking, or misuse of your data, thus increasing the risk of stalkers and hackers tracking your identity and location.
Therefore, to keep yourself hidden on the internet and other social media platforms, it is necessary for you to remove image metadata from all your photos.
How to check for EXIF data in Windows?
Before we learn how to remove metadata from photos, it is crucial to understand how we can check for the EXIF metadata attached to our batch of pictures.
Here are the steps through which you can check your image metadata:
1. Locate your image on the hard drive.
2. Right-click on the photo.
3. Go to the Properties option in the menu.
4. And click on the Details tab.
You can now see the metadata attached to the image folder. These EXIF data contain the following information about you:
- The date and time when you took the picture.
- Your GPS coordinates when you took the photo (latitude + longitude coordinates).
- Model of the device.
- Camera settings and features.
- Details about the editing software you used to edit your image.
This information travels with your pictures wherever you post them on any platform. Moreover, anyone downloading, sharing, or saving these images can access all your details and use them to track you down.
2 Ways to Remove Photo Metadata
How to Remove Metadata from photos manually?
You can follow these simple and easy steps to remove metadata from pictures in Windows:
1. Go to the image folder/file section on your PC.
2. Select the photo you want to delete EXIF data from.
3. Right-click on it and select the Properties menu.
4. Select the Details option.
5. Now choose the Remove Properties and Personal Information option in the dialogue box.
6. Windows will ask if you want to save a copy of the picture with its metadata removed or if you want to remove image metadata from the original photo. You can choose your preference and then click OK.
So, this is how you remove metadata from photos in Windows.
How to Remove Metadata from Photos using a third-party tool?
You can also use a third-party tool, such as Photos Exif Editor, to remove the rest of your metadata from your selected batch of photos.
Photos Exif Editor is an image metadata editing software that removes and changes EXIF, XMP, and IPTC metadata from all your digital photos stored on your PC quickly and effortlessly.
Special Features:
1. Read and rewrite EXIF, XMP, IPTC metadata, and many more.
2. Supports multiple standard photo formats, including RAW photos.
3. Lets you manually enter GPS coordinates for any image.
4. Allows you to save Presets for repeating EXIF data to speed up the process.
5. Can create an automatic backup of original images with metadata before any editing.
6. It can delete metadata individually or from a selected batch of pictures.
Compatibility – Windows 11/10/8.1/8/7 & Vista ( 32 and 64-bitt)
Download or Buy Photos Exif Editor for Windows to remove image metadata.
How to delete metadata using Photos Exif Editor :
1. Complete the installation once you have downloaded Photos Exif Editor on your PC.
2. Open the Photos Exif Editor app. Select Add Folder or Add Photos based on your requirements.
3. Select whether you want to delete EXIF, XMP, or IPTC metadata from your image. Then choose your editing option from the Choose Editing Option, for example, Clean Metadata Info, for your picture.
4. Then click on the Start Process button at the bottom. A pop-up will display asking you whether you want to apply the EXIF editing option to your photos. Click Yes to proceed.
5. Your photo will get edited, and all the metadata will be removed now. You can save this picture or download it based on your preference.
Conclusion
So, now you know how to remove metadata from photos on your PC. Today, where the trend to share and upload images about your life has become a common practice on the internet, you must follow precautions to keep yourself safe from hackers who steal your data and use it to violate your privacy.
We don’t want you to stop having fun on social media only because someone can save and steal your data. And therefore, the best way to deal with this problem is to remove metadata from pictures. While you can delete EXIF data of your images by yourself, using a software tool can come in handy.
And the best tool to help you out here is Photos Exit Editor. So, install the same for your Windows OS today, and protect yourself from cybercrimes by deleting metadata from your images on your PC!
We hope the article was helpful for you in learning how to delete EXIF data. We would like to know your views on this post to make it more useful. Your suggestions and comments are welcome in the comment section below. Share the information with your friends and others by sharing the article on social media.
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