1mo ago

You can (probably should) remove personal information from a photo before uploading it to social media

Your photos might include information of the exact location and time of the photo taken, your photo/camera models etc. Companies, governments, or someone with bad intentions can use such information for their benefits against you. This can easily be accessed by AI as well.

On Windows 11:

Right-click on the file
Properties
Details
Remove properties and personal information

Lots of people don't care, but I guess this could be useful for some of you.

75 comments

Alternatively, you can (probably should) decide to not upload any photo to social media.
- That would destroy the majority of Lemmy though
  
  The data is different for a 'photo' one took vs one of many other types of image. Your camera/phone can often include a lot of surprising data, possibly even your PII or location. An image you made in krita or with a screenshotting tool is somewhat less likely to have such data.

Feels like an honorable site would make the uploader aware of this and offer a checkbox or something to do it for you.
- Every site that allows image upload in existence now strips this data by default, but they do it on their server so they can get it first.
  
  I mean, I'd probably do it server-side even if I were to have nefarious intent and want the data for myself anyway, since image processing client-side isn't necessarily a good use of your users devices, really.
  Plus, if I were to want the data in a client-side, I could upload it before doing the client-side stripping.
  This comment doesn't really hold up to scrutiny, my friend

Every social-media platform strips EXIF metadata before publishing the photo.
So the issue is the trustworthiness of the social-media platform itself. Personally I always strip the metadata before sharing anything anywhere.
- Of course they strip it before publishing and of course they use the stripped data for themselves. Anyone assuming that they won't should come and buy that bridge that I'm selling, it's a great opportunity!
- Strips metadata so that the public can't see it, isn't the same as stripping metadata after the corporation has already collected and linked it to your profile. 😫
  Always clean the metadata BEFORE it touches their upload UI.
- Sure, but let’s say you don’t allow Facebook to track your location. Well, as soon as you upload a photo with location exif data, they know it anyway.
  
  Yeah that's true but in this scenario it's your fault, not theirs.
  
  They know the location data in the photo, that doesn't necessarily mean it's your current location.
  Bonus points for faking that data (with, e.g., exiftool).
- This. Literally every social media site strips EXIF data from photos you post or else you would be hearing about 100x the number of doxxes you do these days. This tip would've been good in 2006 or if you're communicating over something unusual like Email or Onionshare
- While this is true, especially with all the Palintir tracking stuff and the insatiable thirst for data to market, it's far more valuable now than ever to the platform. The platform is happy to keep it and sell it to marketers who will share it for you.
- Frankly I would extend that distrust to this little miscrosoft button too. With no proof or alternative in mind, it just feels like that button would feed the data to an AI before deleting it.

For Android, there are e.g.
Scrambled Exif Gitlab F-Droid
ExifEraser Github Izzy or
ImagePipe Codeberg F-Droid

You guys are uploading personal photos to social media?!
- That's how 99% of social media works
  
  Terrible idea. Hopefully it never catches on or we're all in deep shit.
  
  pfft- yeah right. What, it's populated by a bunch of ignorant twits who were never told any better by even ignoranter twits? I don't think so

For iPhone you can make a simple shortcut to do this. Here’s what it would look like:
- Thanks for that. I’ve made one exactly as you describe. Anyone can download it here https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/9adfbc6f62084faa81fbe5da71515a7b

For linux I use exiftool
exiftool -all= image.jpg
- thank you for the linux command!
- Can it be made into a Cinnamon extension or even a tool with which I would run it for all new image files while idle (if needed)?
  
  I'm sure it can. I found several tutorials on how to add it to Dolphin's right click context menu, I just haven't taken the time to do it.

I discovered that recent versions of the built-in photo apps on Android flat out refuses to do this. The UI for removing location info is there, but it is intentionally blocked if the exif info was added automatically by GPS (i.e., it only works if you manually have set a location). It seems so weird, and outright evil, to block one of the key ways for people to stay safe.
- Scrambled Exif has served me well.

You should be able to prevent your device from adding the location to your photos. I never felt the need to have it, given the date and the photos around, it is easy to remember where it was.
- By default I always turn off the location setting on the camera. I disabled it as soon as they introduced it as a "feature". I thought it was creepy as fuck and dangerous. Without the location most of the rest of the information is pretty benign.
  For example her is the full metadata from a picture I took yesterday.
  Aperture: 182/100 Date: 2025-07-30 15:40:26 Date digitized: 2025-07-30 15:40:26 Original date: 2025-07-30 15:40:26 Digital zoom: 1.0 Exposure bias: 0/6 Exposure mode: Auto Exposure program: Normal Exposure time: 4.7824007651841227E-4 sec. Flash: Off Focal length: 5590/1000 35mm focal length: 24 F-number: 1.8 Image width: 2304 Image length: 4096 Lens model: OnePlus 13R back camera >5.59mm f/1.9 Light source: D65 Camera make: OnePlus Camera model: OnePlus 13R Camera maker note: {"PiFlag":"0","nightFlag":"4","nightMode": "-1","asdOut": ["0"],"apsAsdOut": ["1"],"apsAsdClsOut": ["1", "0"],"iso": "286","expTime": "0","fType":"50","bkMode":"0","aideblur":"0","aisState":"8","algo": ["65,72,16,19"],"filter": ":-1"} Lens max aperture: 182/100 Metering mode: Center weight average Orientation: Normal Photographic sensitivity: 80 X dimension: 2304 Y dimension: 4096 Scene capture type: Standard Scene type: Directly photographed User comment: oplus_2097184 White balance: Auto
  The only thing they would get is the model of phone I use. Which is essentially public information for every app maker I have installed on my phone anyways.

Most sites strip metadata thankfully.
- Yes, but the company could still keep the data somewhere.
  
  True, but I was thinking of this as someone else viewing the photo seeing the metadata.

Linux:

 undefined

        exiftool -overwrite_original -all= ~/Downloads/your_photo.jpg

ehhh
Screenshot
Paste Screenshot
Works on all platforms
Apple puts a little exif data in there, but it's not very useful data.

There are a million ways to do this, as have already been described in other comments. This is one more. I built https://photostripper.com/ a while back, when I was practicing building small web applications to learn different tech stacks. Lemmy is not the target audience - you folks know how to do this already, and why would you trust that I’m not keeping copies of your photos (I promise I’m not, but what is that worth?)
Anyway, I’m only mentioning it because it’s my thing and I enjoyed making it.

I haven’t looked into this, but if it doesn’t already, Lemmy and PieFed should scrub this data before writing it to disk. Would be a lot easier to implement this in one place than teach everyone to scrub the data themselves. If either of them don’t do that, we should put up a feature request.

Or just don't.

most social media sites already do that for you . Unless you upload the image as a document, most media sites automatically remove the exif and compress the img.
- Bots including Mark Zuckerberg is going to keep all your data before "doing that for you".

https://guardianproject.info/apps/org.witness.sscphase1/
Above you will find the link for an app called a obscure cam. It's open source and made by the Guardian Project. It allows you to sensor faces and automatically removes exaptata from your photos so that you don't put your geolocation on dating apps.
If all of the Tea users used this, that breach wouldn't be even a quarter as bad. Also would help if they didn't post their fn drivers license to a dating app.

I run it through my 1995-era photo editor that doesn't support all the metadata.

You want to use the Metadata Anonymisation Toolkit not trust Microsoft to not fuck you

Also on mobile what works for me when uploading a photo, I generally screenshot and upload that screenshot. Never upload the "original" photo.
- Your phone or computer may add that data into its screenshots. Use a metadata cleaner if you want to be thorough.

I bet there are some poorly-built automatic scrapers out there harvesting EXIF tag data and not being too careful about sanitizing what they find.

I've always been curious how one could verify that all that exif data was certainly removed fully
- There are EXIF data viewers. You can just look at it. ExifTool and so forth. You can also use it to remove such data if you don't trust Windows to do it for you.
  At least a subset of EXIF data can be viewed in Windows Explorer in your file properties. Technically any device or app can store any custom field within the EXIF data so long as it fits within the data size limitations, so it's certainly possible there could be gumpf in there that Explorer won't display.
  
  I trust windows about as much as every kgb employee

On linux you should use exifcleaner. The amount of info exiftool can pull from your photos is shocking. I thought Signal exifcleans but not clean enough apparently

any of you allow gps for your photo app?

Since we're on Lemmy, most people probably use Linux. You can use mat2 for this. It's CLI tho
- exiftool

I can recommend ffshare on android. Works like a pipe in unixland.

If you are on android: https://f-droid.org/packages/com.jarsilio.android.scrambledeggsif

with opencamera you can check the option to don't save any extra data

I was at a restaurant earlier this year, and I actually saw someone take a picture of their food, screen shot that picture, and send it on their messaging app of choice. Was so cool seeing it happen in person in my tiny town, and not just in the big cities or the internet

I’m pretty sure Lemmy strips it

Why would I use Windows?

75 comments