Most of today's camera smartphones, as well as scanners, compact digital cameras and SLR cameras, have the possibility of incorporating information such as the geographical position in which they were taken, the date, the model of the machine into the photo. photographic, sometimes even the serial number, the author of the photo and numerous other traceable attributes. This information is stored in the EXIF metadata .
From Exif data it is possible, not only theoretically but also practically, to go back to where, when and with which camera a photo was taken because technical information, date and geographic coordinates detected by GPS are stored.
The geolocation of photos is a useful feature if you want to create automatically organized photo albums, referring to specific places that may be the places where you went on vacation but are also information that those who want to maintain privacy may not want to share.
Editing data Exif allows you to organize photos automatically on programs such as Picasa and also to attribute the authorship and copyright of the photo and be recognized as authors in case you want to share it on professional photography sites or on your own photoblog.
Deleting Exif data instead allows you to maintain privacy and empty photos of traceable information.
As seen in another article, when you find a photo on the internet or received via email, if it was sent to a site that maintains the original format without resizing the photos (Flickr and Facebook do not keep the complete Exif data), you can find the camera with which the photograph was taken, the where and when .
Linking back to that article, we see here some programs that allow you to see what is written on the Exif data of your photographs and also to modify them with different values or eliminate them entirely .
1) Pixelgarde is a new program that proposes itself as a protector of the privacy of digital images and photos .
PixelGarde can be downloaded for free for Windows and then also for iPhone and Android so that you can delete or modify Exif data directly from your mobile phone.
Pixelgarde allows you to select the type of information you want to delete from the photo or you can choose to delete all the data at once.
To use the program on Windows, just drag the photo onto the Pixelgarde window, select it and then choose, by pressing the buttons below, which Exif data to modify or delete.
You can then remove the data relating to geolocation, you can change the title, the author and the date of the shot.
You can also edit or delete the Exif data of multiple photos together by selecting them all from the main interface.
2) Microsoft Pro Photo Tools 2 is an old Microsoft program (it has not been updated since 2008) that allows you to read and modify the Exif data of a photo and with which it becomes easier to understand what they are.
With Pro Photo Tools you can add photos by dragging them on the program window and then scroll through the various data and, if you want, edit or delete them.
After adding a group of photos that have GPS geolocation data, you can also see the images on the map.
3) GeoSetter is instead a much bigger and more powerful program that allows you to manage Exif data for any type of image or photo.
It works as a resource explorer with which to search for photos and browse computer image folders by immediately seeing Exif data and, if desired, modifying them.
4) Image Metadata Stripper is a simple program to erase all Exif data from one or more photos quickly.
