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:

  1. Right-click on the file
  2. Properties
  3. Details
  4. Remove properties and personal information

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

all 74 comments

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[–] 1 point 1 year ago

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

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  • I’m pretty sure Lemmy strips it

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  • [–] 55 points 1 year ago (6 children)

    Feels like an honorable site would make the uploader aware of this and offer a checkbox or something to do it for you.

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  • [–] 65 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago* (2 children)

    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

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    Calling deleting metadata image processing is a bit of a stretch. And you can disingenuously clean images either client- or server-side, that's true, but if we're getting serious here about data privacy, one could independently validate, build, and sign an executable for users to run locally. I don't know of any similar technique to guarantee what's running server-side.

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  • [–] 53 points 1 year ago (8 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 22 points 1 year ago

    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!

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  • [–] 18 points 1 year ago

    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.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    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.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago

    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

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  • [–] 26 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    For iPhone you can make a simple shortcut to do this. Here’s what it would look like:

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  • [–] 24 points 1 year ago* (2 children)

    For linux I use exiftool

    exiftool -all= image.jpg

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  • [–] 19 points 1 year ago* (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 129 points 1 year ago (14 children)

    Alternatively, you can (probably should) decide to not upload any photo to social media.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (12 children)

    That would destroy the majority of Lemmy though

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago

    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.

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  • [+] -20 points 1 year ago (11 children)
  • [–] 11 points 1 year ago (9 children)

    What the actual hell is all that?

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  • [–] 10 points 1 year ago (8 children)

    Check their history. They are stalking and harassing a couple of users they have a disagreement with.

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  • [+] -12 points 1 year ago (6 children)
  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Dude, block them and move on. It's not healthy to obsess about stuff like that. It's just adding stress that you could easily avoid.

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  • [+] -7 points 1 year ago (3 children)
  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    I read through that conversation. They didn’t doxx you. You appear to be having some sort of mental health crisis, maybe log off the internet for a bit and talk to someone you trust.

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  • [+] -7 points 1 year ago (2 children)
  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    I really think you should reach out to a friend or family member.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Use the block button and move on. Otherwise you are breaking Lemmy's harassment rules.

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  • [+] 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 child)
  • Then report their comment and move on. This form of "consequence" is but harassment that doesn't cast you in a good light either. We all have bad days, we all get agrivated by things sometimes. If you need someone to vent with you can message me directly if you like, but I would advise taking a step back after reporting the original comment because you may look back on this as them being mean, but regret your actions as well.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago

    Pretty sure posting the exact same unhinged comment 100 times is not going to get you anywhere that posting it...uh...once?...would have.

    That said, maybe screaming into the void is your idea of a good time.

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  • [–] 15 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    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.

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  • [+] 14 points 1 year ago (2 children)
  • [–] 26 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    You guys are uploading personal photos to social media?!

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    That's how 99% of social media works

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  • [–] 12 points 1 year ago

    Linux:

    exiftool -overwrite_original -all= ~/Downloads/your_photo.jpg
    
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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago

    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.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago

    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.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago*

    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.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago* (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago

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

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago*

    Also on mobile what works for me when uploading a photo, I generally screenshot and upload that screenshot. Never upload the "original" photo.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    I've always been curious how one could verify that all that exif data was certainly removed fully

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • 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.

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  • [–] 10 points 1 year ago

    ehhh

    Screenshot

    Paste Screenshot

    Works on all platforms

    Apple puts a little exif data in there, but it's not very useful data.

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  • 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

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    any of you allow gps for your photo app?

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (1 child)

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

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

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

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  • [–] -2 points 1 year ago

    Why would I use Windows?

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