JPG Metadata Removal?

If I share JPG pictures with others, can the JPG pictures contain personal or sensitive data?

What exactly is metadata and do I need a JPG metadata removal program? Any freeware ones exist?

thanks!

 

taken from Wikipedia;

to remove metadata use either of these freewares.

BatchPurifier LITE

Exif Tag Remover

 

Here's an online tool that displays the EXIF info (metadata) of image files:

Jeffrey's Exif Viewer

As far as I'm aware, most standard image editing programs have an option to strip this data. Alternatively, simply saving the file as a different file type (.png, .gif, etc.) should accomplish this as well.

 

How about imagemagick?

-http://www.imagemagick.org/script/binary-releases.php

At command line, you'd run this:

convert tagged-image.jpg -strip clean-image.jpg

 

Thanks everyone

 

To be *sure*...open the .jpg (Irfanview is awesome), and then hit 'Print Screen', then paste back into Irfanview and create a new, sterile .jpg. Works with .pdf and Word documents, etc... as well.

PD