Thread: Protect Your Privacy When UpLoading Photos.

Inside Your Photo's Metadata

Quite a lot of information is lurking around inside your photos-more than you might know. You can uncover all that metadata either in Windows itself or through a photo organizer. If you have Windows Vista, for example, right-click a photo and choose Properties. Then click the Details tab, and you should see much of the metadata that is packed into your photo.

Photo organizers often arrange the same information in a more attractive way. (The online version of this article-at find.pcworld.com/62883includes an example.)

Most of that information is pretty innocuous. The shutter speed and aperture setting of your camera? No big deal. But what if you use a GPS device to geolocate your photos? That can be handy, but you might not want to upload the GPS location of your own backyard to the Web.

Keywords and tags can also be tricky, at least potentially. In my blog, I've long been recommending that you tag your photos instead of organizing them by folder. And that's fine, unless you hap- pen to use embarrassing keywords. If you tagged photos of a relative, friend, or coworker with a snarky nickname, for example, don't forget that if you upload the picture to a photo-sharing Web site, the tag usually uploads with it, too. So anyone who looks at your picture of the boss will be able to see that you tagged him as "clumsy." Oops. How You Can Protect Your Private Info Concerned? If you have metadata you might not want to share with the world, fear not. It's easy to strip personal information out of your image files before you upload them to the Internet. all of a photo's metadata using nothing more than Windows itself, if you have Vista. Just go back to the Details tab of the Properties dialog box discussed earlier. At the bottom of the window, you should see a link that says Remove Properties and Personal Inftrmation. Click it, and Windows will strip all the metadata away from the photo. You can even select several images and do this to all of them at the same time.

If you don't have Vista, or you want an even easier meta data removal method, try a program like JPEG & PNG Stripper (find.pcworld, com/62884). This free utility does exactly what it promises: To use it, just drag your photo files to the Stripper window, and the app instantly erases the metadata.

If you use either of these methods to delete metadata, it will be gone forever, so you'll probably wish to remove the metadata only from the copy of the photo that you plan to upload or share.

Don't do it to the copy you're keeping on your computer unless you are sure you'll never want to search for it by its tags or look up the exposure information ever again.