Planet Photoshop

Hiding Your Metadata From Others

January 23, 2008 by Corey Barker Tip of the Day Leave a comment

If you’re providing photos to magazines, websites, or really just about anybody, you might want to strip out your metadata, or anybody with Photoshop will be able to learn a lot about you. For example, they’ll know what kind of camera and lens you have (including make and model), what day you took the photo, edited the photo, and so on. Luckily, stripping the data out is easy, because you don’t really strip it out. Just do this: Open the photo in Photoshop. Press Command-A (PC: Control-A) to select all, then press Command-C (PC: Control-C) to copy the photo into memory. Press Command-N (PC: Control-N) to create a new blank document in the same size, color mode, and resolution of your copied photo. Don’t change anything; just click OK. When the new document appears, press Command-V (PC: Control-V) to paste your copied photo into your new document. Press Command-E (PC: Control-E) to merge this image layer with your Background layer, and save the file. The embedded EXIF data is left behind, giving you a clean image with no personal data attached.

Posted by Corey Barker

Corey is the newest education and curriculum developer for the National Association of Photoshop Professionals. He is a graduate of the Ringling School of Art & Design in Sarasota, Fl, with a degree in Illustration. Over the years, Corey has worked as a graphic artist in a variety of disciplines such as illustration, commercial design, large format printing, motion graphics, web design and photography. His expertise in Photoshop and Illustrator have earned him numerous awards in illustration, graphic design and photography. Using Photoshop since Version 2, his expertise and creativity have evolved exponentially with every new version, which makes Corey an invaluable addition to the NAPP team.