The pictures you take using your digital camera contain meta data such as camera model, camera firmware version, time and date of picture, geo-location, latitude and longitude etc. This information can be used to identify the location and time of taking the picture. Sleuths or hackers can easily track you down with this information. If you do not want this to happen, then you can clear the meta data from your photos using a free tool called AntiPhotoSpy. It can automatically search the photos on your hard disk that contain meta data and clear it.
You can download AntiPhotoSpy from the Abelssoft website. The download is available as a setup installer. The download is a little around 4 megabytes in size. After the installation, it adds a new shortcut on your desktop using which you can run it. The software requires free registration using your email address which is not very difficult thing to do.
In the AntiPhotoSpy window, you can select one or more disk drives on your computer where you want it to look for the pictures. You can also add a custom folder where your pictures are located. By default only JPEG pictures are searched, but you can change or modify the file types by clicking on the File Type Settings. After this you can click on the Start search button to search your disk for pictures with meta data.
In a short while, it would display how many pictures that contain meta data have been found. You can click on the Clean Selection to select the image files that you want to clean. Finally, you can click on the Clean up Photos to remove the meta data from the selected pictures. Alternatively, you can create a copy of pictures without meta data in another location; this way you would have two sets of pictures – one without meta data and one with meta data.
Other than the batch cleaning of meta data from the found multiple pictures, AntiPhotoSpy also has a feature called Single Cleaning through which you can clear the meta data from a single selected picture. It is a great software that can quickly remove the meta data that can otherwise compromise your privacy. By removing the meta data, you also reduce the size of the pictures to a certain extent.
You can download AntiPhotoSpy from http://www.abelssoft.net/.