Quick and easy way to remove metadata that could compromise privacy

[Cynthia Moore]

As I understand it, IV, perhaps with an add-on, can remove some metadata, but it appears that this is far from easy or even straightforward. I would love to see a simple option that does not require an add-on that would remove any and all metadata, such as GPS coordinates, that could compromise privacy without compromising image quality. In this day when people are uploading images all the time, I think this would be a highly valuable option. The tools that are specifically for this purpose seem unnecessarily obtuse.

If this is already available in IV, please let me know where to find it.

Thanks

[JendaLinda]

GPS is stored in the EXIF data. There are two was to easily remove EXIF data:

1) Using lossless JPEG transformations (Shift+J) - select transformation None or Autorotate and at the bottom you can select which metadata will be kept or removed.
2) When you edit the photos, in the Save dialog, there are also options for saving different metadata.

[Su2021]

I assume you are referring only to JPEG files and compatible containers (TIFF with JPEG inside).
For these files, indeed as JendaLinda wrote, Shift-J and selecting "Clean all APP markers" will erase the extra headers

However, a safer option is to use "exiftool", which can do that for all kinds of image formats (including video):
- exiftool -all:all foo.bar
Note that for some RAW file formats it will also remove information used by some viewers, but for common image formats (JPEG,PNG,TIFF etc), the above options are safe.

[JendaLinda]

Indeed, exiftool is a very useful program.

The question was if IrfanView includes such feature. As far as I know, IrfanView can store metadata only in JPEG.
The concerns about privacy are relevant when uploading pictures to the web. You usually don't publish pictures in RAW or TIFF formats, these are intended for archival purposes.

Also, it's always a good idea to use the Lossless JPEG transformations to optimize JPEG files. It uses more efficient compression of the already quantized data, so the image quality is preserved.