How To Remove Metadata From Your Files

Hidden Attributes and Tags Might Reveal More Than You Would Like

You may not be aware that the documents you generate, and the photos you edit on your computer are “stamped” (if you will) with little bits and pieces of information that the computer thinks are useful — called “metadata“. This metadata is not out in plain site for you to notice, but it’s there. Fortunately, it is not difficult to remove.

Metadata is essentially there to help the computers do their jobs better and faster, and can be helpful to us as well.

Metadata for a photograph would typically include the date and time at which it was taken and details of the camera settings, such as focal length, aperture, exposure. It would also contain any titles or keyword “tags” we’ve added to help us organize our albums.

Metadata for a document would typically include the date and time at which it was created, title, author, subject, number of pages, and the language of the text.

But the metadata will also contain the number of revisions, how long you spent working on it, (possibly) hidden markups/edits, who it is “shared” with, who else it’s been sent to, the Save path (which usually reveals your User Name), computer name, and more.
This can open you up to embarrassment (What? They took 4 hours and 6 revisions to write this ??? And why did they show it Joe?) and/or provide info a hacker might use to gain control of your PC.

Tip of the day: Before you e-mail off your file as an attachment, or turn it in to the boss, it might be a good idea to strip it of the metadata. To do this:
1) right-click of the file and select “Properties” from the context menu. In my example, I’ll use a Word document named BarbaraInvoice.doc.

2) Click on the “Details” tab, and look to the bottom area. Click on “Remove Properties and Personal Information”.

3) A new window will open. Here you will see two choices represented by radio buttons. ‘Remove it all’ is the default, but you can be selective by clicking the second button, and using the window scroll, and remove just certain tags.

4) Click “OK”, and the metadata is gone.

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Copyright 2007-9 © Tech Paul. All rights reserved. post to jaanix

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