exif

Digital photographs, whether they come from your point-and-shoot camera, dSLR, or your smartphone, contain hidden data. Most of the data is harmless, like the model of the camera and settings used in the shot. You might, however, want to limit the sharing of GPS data, which could reveal where you live, work, or where your kids go to school.

If you want to keep all the data intact, but make a scrubbed copy to share safely, you can do so in Windows without any additional software. However, not all versions of Windows support the removal of metadata from photos. Alternatively, … Read more

When you upload photos to Facebook, Twitter, or elsewhere on the Internet, you may be sharing more information than you know. Your photos can have hidden data in them, like exact location data. If it's a well-known public location, like Disneyland, you might not mind sharing that, but what if it's your home, or where your kids go to school?

The easiest way to avoid sharing location data on your photos is by turning off geotagging in your Android camera's settings. But maybe you've already taken photos that have location data on them. Or maybe you … Read more

Anyone with a digital camera knows how easy it is to end up with a slew of images with meaningless file names; they're often a string of numbers and letters that tell you absolutely nothing about the image. Namexif is a simple utility that can rename images based on their EXIF data, creating new file names based on the date and time the image was created. We think that this is a great way to quickly assign meaningful file names to large batches of images.

Using Namexif is a piece of cake thanks to its wizard-style interface. First, select … Read more

Some of us with a bunch of photos on an iPad would rather add keywords and captions than slap on yet another sepia-tone art filter. Enter C Squared Enterprises' Photosmith.

This $17.99 app, released today, is a companion to Adobe Systems' Lightroom software for editing and cataloging photos. I've been trying beta versions, and I think the app could be a useful addition for some photographers--especially if the software and the iPad's abilities continue to grow beyond today's limitations.

Photosmith can't match what Lightroom proper can do, of course--the iPad's memory, keyboard, and processor … Read more

NEW YORK--Be warned: If you take a snapshot with your iPhone or other camera-enabled gadget, it may divulge more information about you than your photographic abilities.

At the Next HOPE hacker conference here on Friday, a security researcher demonstrated how he scanned over 2.5 million photo links posted to Twitter and extracted exact latitude and longitude coordinates embedded in over 65,000 photos -- typically without the user's knowledge.

"It's a privacy fail," says Ben Jackson of Mayhemic Labs, who plans to release the software and data collection this evening.

It works this way: the … Read more

Modern-day digital cameras can record a wealth of information about the photos they take, everything from details about the camera itself to exposure and flash information. One other very useful type of information that can be stored within image files is location data. Although many newer cameras have GPS capabilities built-in, images taken with older cameras may lack this information. Panorado Flyer makes it easy to add location data to existing images using Google Earth, ensuring that you'll never again look at a photo and wonder, "Where was that taken?"

Panorado Flyer is incredibly easy to use. … Read more

We recently spent some time digging through boxes of old snapshots at our parents' house, and we thought it was kind of sad that so much information about the photos had been lost to the sands of time. Some of the photos had handwritten dates and locations on the back, but most of them were unlabeled. Fortunately for us, and the generations that will follow, digital images are capable of storing tons of information. RoboGEO allows users to easily attach latitude, longitude, and altitude information to images, ensuring that viewers will always know where the images came from.

The program'… Read more

Exif Pilot Pro is a simple program that allows you to analyze and edit the EXIF information for a digital photo. While it certainly won't win any design awards, we found it very easy to operate.

The user interface is pretty basic: menu items run across the top; a tree-menu for browsing files sits on the left, with customizable columns for the image's focal length, aperture, exposure, and flash in the middle. A right-hand preview pane displays the selected image and its EXIF information. We used the tree menu to quickly locate a digital picture we'd taken. … Read more

Exif wMarker is a basic program that applies watermarks to batches of images. With the capability to apply not only custom text but also EXIF and IPTC information to images, this program gives you some extra options for creating useful watermarks.

The program's interface is plain and fairly intuitive: Simply select the source and destination folders for the images to which you want to add watermarks, and then input the actual watermark information, which is formatted as a separate header and footer on each image. You can write freeform text or easily insert File, EXIF, and IPTC metadata information … Read more