Monday, September 21, 2009

Windows Vista helpful in removing personal info

Many digital photo enthusiasts tag and\or keyword their photos rather than creating subfolders to organize them. By tagging or keywording a user can call up all photos associated with a particular word.

For example if you tag or keyword every photo of your grandchild "Joanie" and then add a tag or keyword to each of Joanie’s photos describing the photo e.g., "birthday" or ‘Halloween", you can recall all photos of Joanie, just the photos of Joanie’s birthdays or Halloweens or all of Joanie’s birthday and Halloween photos.

Tags and keywords are included in a digital photo’s metadata along with information placed there by your digital camera. Right click on the photo and select Properties and left click on Details.

If you do not tag, keyword or geolocate should you decide to e-mail a photo or upload the photo to a photo sharing Web site the metadata available to anyone downloading the photo should be of no concern.

But what if you’re in the habit of using creative descriptions as I do. Say for instance I forget to remove a "good family" tag or keyword from a photo I e-mail or post to the Web. It’ll probably not be noticed. But a "bad family" tag will probably be a different story. And I’ll certainly have a problem if the date the photo was taken and its geolocation indicates I blew off an invitation to a bad family’s reunion to attend a Red Sox game!

Vista offers a solution. At the bottom of the "Details" panel is a "Remove Properties and Personal Information" feature. Click it and it’ll remove all the photo’s metadata. Just be sure to make a copy of the photo if you plan on only removing the metadata from the photo you’re e-mailing or posting to the Web.

Xper’s can download a free utility to purge metadata. Google: "JPEG & PNG Stripper".

This week’s recommended software is one among the many excellent, inexpensive software programs offered by Ashampoo.

When I became frustrated with the hard drive hogging and the extraordinary demand placed on my system resources by Nero and Roxio, I decided to give Ashampoo’s free CD burning program a try. I became so enthusiastic I purchased Ashampoo’s Burning Studio 9 and have never looked back. It has all the "CD/DVD/BlueRay burning" features offered by Nero and Roxio, is less expensive and does not hog my disk drive or my system resources.
All Ashampoo’s programs have a free trial download.

Here’s wishing you a Good Boot.
 
 

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