The use of images has spread greatly in recent years thanks to the enormous quality of the lenses of these mobile devices, among other reasons. But we cannot forget that we also continue to use digital cameras specific to these tasks. Many of these even connect to the internet directly to be able to share or send our photos in a matter of seconds.
The truth is that all this allows us to have an enormous amount of this multimedia content in the form of photos, for one use or another. On many occasions we simply use these files to store them on our drives. That is, in the form of digital albums for our enjoyment in the future. But based on the enormous penetration and use of the Internet at this time in our lives, we share many of these photographs with the rest of the world.
However, everything related to security and privacy that matters so much to us at the moment, also affects this type of process. Specifically, we are referring to something that we should keep in mind before sharing this own multimedia content with others. Though send our photos to family or friends, we don’t know where those files might end up in the future. We mean that they could end up on any web page available to everyone. Hence precisely the precautions we must take before carrying out these tasks.
Remove metadata from photos before sharing
In case you do not know, a good part of the captures that we make with our devices include a series of important embedded hidden data. These are called metadata. EXIF, initially they are not visible in a conventional way, hence we are not even aware of their existence. But these can contain sensitive information that could directly affect our privacy or security.
It should be noted that this metadata of the photos can indicate the device with which we captured them, the parameters used, the image ownerour physical location, and much more. Therefore, and as you can imagine, this hidden information reveals data that perhaps we would not like to expose to the rest of the world. In certain circumstances, they could be used maliciously, something that we can easily avoid. And it is that we must know that these hidden metadata to which we refer can be edited or even deleted.
We have several ways to do this, but the best solution is to use some specific program for this type of tasks and thus take care of our privacy. If we remove this hidden data from our personal photos before we share them, the embedded personal information will no longer be available to anyone. This is something that we can carry out directly in Windows, but we recommend that you use some special software for it, such as QuickImageComment, for example.
This is an application that in a simple way allows us to edit or remove all metadata of our images, whatever their format.
