MetaStripper: Free Utility to Remove EXIF Metadata
The other day I was reporting that Picasa Web Albums, the photo sharing site offered by Mountain View-based search engine giant Google, is starting a new year with a few new features. Among those new features is access to more EXIF metadata than ever before. EXIF metadata, information stored inside the image file, like Metering Mode, White Space and Color Balance, can be accessed from the individual photo page by clicking on the “full details page”.
You can check out what other new features Picasa Web Albums got at the start of the year here.
After reporting on Picasa Web Albums I started to wonder: what if you don’t want to upload images with a lot of EXIF metadata? Is there an application out there that can automatically, rapidly and conveniently strip this sort of information from your images?
Of course there has to be such an application out there. I mean there’s an application for pretty much anything you can think of, surely there has to be one for this purpose. But I couldn’t be bothered to look for one.
As luck would have it, I stumbled onto such an application today, while taking a look at a few applications developed by Jarle Aasland, mainly PhotoThumb, PhotoRename, and FolderFTP. The application I so conveniently stumbled upon is appropriately named MetaStripper. When I looked at its description, I noticed the following:
“MetaStripper is a free utility to remove meta information (EXIF, COM and IPTC tags) from JPEG image files. You can automatically process a large number of files with the click of a button.” The description went on to say that “Meta is completely lossless (i.e. no decompression of JPEG image data occurs)” and that “MetaStripper will not, under any circumstance, overwrite your original image files. The program will always assign a unique name to all modified files.”
So there you have it; a free application that conveniently strips EXIF metadata from your images.
If you would like to get MetaStripper, you can download it straight from Jarle Aasland’s site here.
You can check out what other new features Picasa Web Albums got at the start of the year here.
After reporting on Picasa Web Albums I started to wonder: what if you don’t want to upload images with a lot of EXIF metadata? Is there an application out there that can automatically, rapidly and conveniently strip this sort of information from your images?
Of course there has to be such an application out there. I mean there’s an application for pretty much anything you can think of, surely there has to be one for this purpose. But I couldn’t be bothered to look for one.
As luck would have it, I stumbled onto such an application today, while taking a look at a few applications developed by Jarle Aasland, mainly PhotoThumb, PhotoRename, and FolderFTP. The application I so conveniently stumbled upon is appropriately named MetaStripper. When I looked at its description, I noticed the following:
“MetaStripper is a free utility to remove meta information (EXIF, COM and IPTC tags) from JPEG image files. You can automatically process a large number of files with the click of a button.” The description went on to say that “Meta is completely lossless (i.e. no decompression of JPEG image data occurs)” and that “MetaStripper will not, under any circumstance, overwrite your original image files. The program will always assign a unique name to all modified files.”
So there you have it; a free application that conveniently strips EXIF metadata from your images.
If you would like to get MetaStripper, you can download it straight from Jarle Aasland’s site here.
