JPEG & PNG Stripper Removes the Metadata from Your Images [Downloads]
Note: 4 of this post’s 7 links are now broken — mostly dead 2008–2013 feed-syndication infrastructure (FeedBurner, Gawker, AOL’s old blog network, Pheedo, Yahoo Pipes). Left as originally published.
Windows only: JPEG & PNG Stripper an extremely small portable application that strips the metadata out of JPEG and PNG image files.
Why would you want to strip down an image file? Ask former TechTV host Cat Schwartz, who in 2003 received a rather embarrassing lesson in the power of metadata. In short, a cropped headshot posted on her blog contained an embedded, full-pic thumbnail with, well, a lot more than just a head and shoulders. Even if you're not cropping your mug out of a nude composition, there are others reasons you'd want to remove the metadata from an image. All sorts of information—like exposure time, aperture settings, camera used, and GPS coordinates—can potentially be embedded into an image.
JPEG & PNG Stripper removes every bit of metadata, leaving just the unaltered image behind. Whatever your motivation for sanitizing your image, you'll know that only the image itself remains. The screenshot at right shows a read of some of the metadata for an image I scrubbed in testing and, as promised, the application ripped all the metadata out without altering the appearance of the image itself. JPEG & PNG Stripper is freeware, Windows only.