Easy When You Know How
Robert Irvine removes metadata from photos
EXIF data causes trouble when you’re trying to deceive suspicious friends
What a difference four months make. Back in Issue 602 (24 March), I used this column to moan about how boring my photos were because lockdown prevented me from travelling anywhere (yes, poor diddums – I hope I wasn’t being tactless in overlooking people’s more serious Covid problems). Now that restrictions have lifted, you can’t keep me off the trains and in the last few weeks I’ve been to sunny Brighton, overcast Glasgow and drizzly Salisbury, and have documented my jetset (well, rail-set) lifestyle using the camera on my phone.
These pictures also provide handy ‘evidence’ when I want to excuse myself from social events and obligations. “Sorry I can’t help you move house, I’m currently at the seaside – look, here’s me in front of the pier!”. At least that trick would work if it wasn’t for pesky EXIF (Exchangeable Image File Format) data.
This hidden information embedded in photos reveals where they were taken, the camera you used and the precise date and time you pressed the shutter button. Such details can undoubtedly be useful – in Issue 602, I explained how you can use them to create a timeline map of your travels – but can cause trouble when you’re trying to deceive suspicious friends and family members. To cover my tracks, I decided to find a way to strip incriminating EXIF data from my snaps.
The first method I tried involved using trusty old File Explorer in Windows 10. I right-clicked a Brighton selfie I’d downloaded to my desktop, chose Properties and clicked the Details tab. Here the EXIF data showed that I’d captured the shot at 4.15pm on 3 July 2021 (see screenshot above), using my Motorola phone without the flash on. It also provided the GPS coordinates of the photo, and technical details of the exposure time, ISO speed and focal length.
To clean up this metadata, I clicked the ‘Remove Properties and Personal Information’ link at the bottom of the window, then selected ‘Remove the following properties from this file’. I ticked the box next to ‘Date taken’ (other boxes let you clear additional metadata), then clicked OK. On returning to the photo’s Properties panel, I was delighted to see that my ‘dead giveaway’ information had been deleted.
Although File Explorer is effective at removing metadata, it’s not ideal when you have a lot of photos, as this will involve much right-clicking and ticking of boxes. I therefore looked for a batch-removal tool that could purge EXIF data from multiple images simultaneously, and came across a tiny (360KB) free program with the promising name EXIF Purge ( www. exifpurge.com).
I downloaded, extracted and ran the tool, clicked the Select Images button and chose a folder where I would save copies of the cleaned-up images, so the original files wouldn’t be overwritten. I then clicked Purge Exit Info and the program got to work, quickly confirming that ‘EXIF data has been removed from selected images’, before showing a small advert (free software, eh?). I checked its claim using File Explorer and all the data had indeed vanished. Result!
However, I still wasn’t satisfied. I share most photos from my phone, not my PC, so ideally I needed a way to delete EXIF data directly on my device. I found the solution with a free Android app called Photo Metadata Remover ( www.snipca. com/38852), which makes the whole process very easy. I simply tapped Choose Photos on the home screen (see screenshot left), specified an output folder and selected a batch of recent images – you can also choose a whole folder of pics or capture a new shot through the app. Photo Metadata Remover cleared all the EXIF data instantly and offered the useful option to share the results through my usual messaging and social apps.
Now I can confidently send people photos without disclosing when they were taken, which means my postlockdown life of shirking all responsibilities can continue unabated.
Need help removing data from your photos? Let us know: noproblem@computeractive.co.uk