Monday, January 31, 2011

How to Control Your Privacy when Posting Photos online

Sharing photos via Facebook, Twitter and a host of other social media is popular, fun and probably one of the greatest things for people to enjoy.

There IS, however, a privacy issue that you should know about so you don't share personal information you might prefer to keep to yourself.

Before I go any further let's have a definition: "EXIF data" - "EXIF" stands for:EXchangeable Image File - Data that is stored in digital photos, such as camera shutter speed, date & time, focal length, exposure; AND NOW, IN NEWER CAMERAS - GPS location.

The video below covers the issues of unknowingly revealing your GPS location and how that can be dangerous - but doesn't explain HOW to handle the problem.

Which is the point of this article.

I'll show you how to easily edit or remove these detail from shots before posting them.



So there you go.

When posting an image online just decide whether publicizing the image's location carries any security or privacy concerns.

If it does, you can edit or remove that data in several ways.

Writer(and founder)Amit Agarwal at digital inspiration posted an excellent article giving all the different methods and tools for managing EXIF data.

While you'll want to see the full article, I find the simplest handling is as follows:

"Sometimes the Exif data of your photographs may reveal more than what you would expect. It may therefore sometimes sense to strip your images of all the meta information before uploading them to the web.

To remove all the metadata from a photograph, just right-click the files inside Windows Explorer and choose Properties. Now click the Details tab and select the option that says “Remove Properties and Personal Information.”

Choose “Remove the follow properties from this file” followed by “Select All” and click OK. All the private metadata tags are now erased from the photograph. Simple!"




For most of us this isn't too big an issue but help your friends out and make them aware and feel free to share this data.

Raoul