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Tip – Wanna keep people from seeing your metadata?
Have you ever published a photo somewhere (Flickr, your website, blog, etc…) and some one emails or comments to you and asks “Why’d you shoot that photo at f/16? Don’t you think f/11 would have been more appropriate?”. Or perhaps you’re delivering them to a client and you simply don’t want them to know all of the camera info (maybe you got a killer shot with a point-n-shoot but you don’t want them to know it 
).
I call them Metadata Creepers. They creep into your images that you unknowingly posted all of the metadata for and look through only to ask you semi-irrelevant questions. Well there’s a way to automatically get rid of your camera info. When you go to File > Export and the Export dialog opens, you’ll see a small checkbox called “Minimize Embedded Metadata”.
Turn that on and Lightroom will keep any copyright information in the metadata but it’ll remove all of the camera-related stuff. Hope that helps. Have a great weekend everyone!
14 Comments to “Tip – Wanna keep people from seeing your metadata?”
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Although for professionals I can see why protecting your metadata can be an issue, personally, I’ve bee grateful to those who have left it open over the years. It’s been a great resource as a learning tool.
This is exactly why I do not strip metadata. I was thankful for everyone who ever showed me theirs. I want to return the favor.
There are no secrets in photography.
That’s a Cool tip. I always wondered how to do something like this.
Sell a point & shoot image!!?? Who would do that?
LOL that’s exactly what I was thinking
Hi Matt,
Only problem with minimizing it is that the caption does not get sent either. Any work around? Don’t want to send all my metadata but def the caption
Cheers Vincent
Matt,
Another reason you would want to minimize meta data in LR is in PS versions earlier than CS4 if you make brush or gradient adjustments, PS versions before CS4 don’t play well with those images. When it comes to saving after you have done all PS work, you would have to select all copy and paste to a new untitled document. PS seems to not know how to write embedded meta data of the brush or gradient adjustments made in LR.
But this is only an issue for PS versions BEFORE CS4
Ron
How about GPS info ? Sometimes I don’t want that in there.
I don’t care much capture information, but leaving GPS information on a photo is really dangerous sometimes. I don’t want people to know where my client live for example. Good question.
I always do this now so my wedding clients don’t know how I got the results!!
Also if there are 2 of us shooting I tend to move pictures around in LR3 by changing the meta times, a wedding always feel better when it flows right, after this I then export and wipe all the metadata.
Amazing how valuable metadata can be to someone wanting to start in your form of photography, it doesn’t make them a photographer but sure gives them a good idea.
Until Adobe provide a more configurable feature I thouroughly recommend the
Jeffrey Friedl plugin for this.
“Metadata Wrangler”
http://regex.info/blog/lightroom-goodies/metadata-wrangler
Fully configurable and you can set up different presets for each different type of export. I have one for mail type exports which have little or nothing in except copyright and contact info and one for flickr type exports which have just about everything in.
I have no connection with this plugin (which is Donationware, pay what you feel) other than as a long time satisfied user.
You can also use the Metadata Wrangler plugin to control exactly what metadata is keeped or deleted.
http://regex.info/blog/lightroom-goodies/metadata-wrangler
If you want have full control about embedded metadata, you can add a script or batch file in “Post-Processing” and use ExifTool (http://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/). Under Windows a batch file removing all metadata looks like that:
exiftool ^
-all= ^
-make= ^
-model= ^
-artist= ^
-modifydate= ^
–icc_profile:all ^
-overwrite_original ^
%*
where “exiftool.exe” has to be in the executable’s path or has to be specified (e.g. “C:\Program Files\exiftool\exiftool.exe”).
Thanks for this bit of info, it helps