Review the metadata of your photos and videos before publishing. Preserve metadata to provide valuable information like gear and shooting settings, location, or editing history.
Leverage all this information hidden in your raw and master image and video files. Use it to identify either success or error sources and improve your processes.
Protect sensitive information from becoming public removing EXIF data. Avoid privacy related issues and information leaks that give insights into your processes to competitors.
Strip metadata and optimize images an videos to publish on the web or social media in a single step, preserving privacy and reducing bandwidth.
EXIF (Exchangeable Image File Format) is a standard for storing interchange information in digital photo files. Data such as shutter speed, exposure compensation, F number, what metering system was used, if a flash was used, ISO number, date and time the image was taken, whitebalance, auxiliary lenses that were used and resolution are stored by digital cameras.
Every time you take a picture with your digital camera or phone, a file (typically a JPEG) is written to your device’s storage. In addition to all the bits dedicated to the actual picture, it records a considerable amount of additional metadata. This data usually includes date, time, camera settings, geolocation coordinates, orientation, etc. Photo processing software, like Photoshop, can also add further metadata to EXIF.
You cannot stop metadata from being added to your photographs and videos. It is also a good practice to save this information, since it provides useful information to manage your photo gallery later. Creation dates, geotagging, and camera settings and orientation are valuable data which can be removed later, when the images and videos are shared and published.
To view the file metadata, just upload an image or video (e.g. JPEG image, CR2 photo, MOV video, PSD file) to the gallery and double click on the thumbnail to show the metadata viewer. If you want to remove the metadata click "remove metadata" to strip the EXIF data preserving the file content or create a new web optimized version using the "export" button from the gallery.
A lot of this stuff is mundane, but it also can contain potentially sensitive information, like geolocation data (GPS coordinates where the picture was taken) or camera settings.
Metadata are specially sensitive for photographers, where lots of information are shared in it, like location and camera settings. This kind of information is very useful to day-to-day work, but it must be removed when the image is published and distributed to avoid private and professional data leaks, like with stock repositories.
While geolocation data are useful for geotagging, such as allowing users on photo-sharing sites to see any images taken in specific locations, view where your pictures were taken on a map, and to find and follow social events. However they are a data leak when they are directly shared on the Internet.
When images are photographed, digital cameras use orientation sensors to store an EXIF orientation value for how camera is held. This information is used later to automatically rotate your photos, saving you of this manual task.
There are 8 possible EXIF orientation values, which reflect the position of the camera with respect to the ground, numbered 1 to 8:
| Flag | Orientation | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 0 degrees | the correct orientation, no adjustment is required. |
| 2 | 0 degrees, mirrored | image has been flipped back-to-front. |
| 3 | 180 degrees | image is upside down. |
| 4 | 180 degrees, mirrored | image is upside down and flipped back-to-front. |
| 5 | 90 degrees | image is on its side. |
| 6 | 90 degrees, mirrored | image is on its side and flipped back-to-front. |
| 7 | 270 degrees | image is on its far side. |
| 8 | 270 degrees, mirrored | image is on its far side and flipped back-to-front. |
In the 7 scenarios – 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 – the image need to be rotated before orientation stripped. Most common photo management programs read EXIF orientation to show photos on the right position. However, browsers don't perform this task, which means that the image or photo must be rotated before web publishing.
When you rotate or flip an image, EXIF orientation must be removed. Most programs do this task correctly, however some programs don't: like Windows Photo Viewer or Microsoft Paint. If you have some problems with photo rotation, you must fix this issue with a editing software like Photoshop, GIMP, or OSX Preview.
Metadata result in data leaks and waste of kilobytes on web . This is why is recommended to remove EXIF data when images are published and distributed. - A right image optimization process removes all this information before compressing the image. - Moreover, images need to be rotated and correctly compressed for web publishing. To automatically perform all this tasks, you can easily take advantage from our export tool, and get perfectly optimized images for web.