AntiPhotoSpy for Windows

Pictures often hold much more information than meets the eye, but maybe you're not aware of how much, where it is, and what this information might say about you. If you take a lot of digital snapshots (and who doesn't?) you're probably aware of all the metadata stored with your pics, such as date and time, location, exposure, and even camera make and model. Some of that data might be personal or sensitive, especially if you're a commercial photographer; but even amateurs who want to protect their privacy have an interest in purging sensitive personal and EXIF data from their image files. Abelssoft's AntiPhotoSpy scans your PC for digital snapshots and other images that contain metadata. You can clean files individually or in batches or create metadata-free copies of images that are stored separately. AntiPhotoSpy is shareware that is free to try for 30 days.

AntiPhotoSpy's easy-to-use dialog-style user interface takes some of its visual cues from Microsoft's Office Suite, especially Outlook. The left sidebar accesses all the program's features: Search, Single Clean, Settings, Update-Check, and Web site. In Step 1, AntiPhotoSpy searches for images. The search tool selected all of our drives automatically; we simply needed to uncheck any drive to exclude it. We could also specify which image file types to search for in the Settings. The search took only a few minutes and tallied all the images in our directories containing metadata. Step 2, Cleanup, involves one of two processes, deleting all metadata or saving the images, sans metadata, at a new location. We tried both. In either case, a progress bar tracked the job. We opened both the original and cleaned versions of images to verify that, yes, AntiPhotoSpy had deleted the metadata from images stored in our newly- created folder.

AntiPhotoSpy is very easy to use and performs a valuable service, but the all-or-nothing nature of its cleaning process leads us to recommend saving metadata-free copies of your images, if you have the disk space, instead of simply purging data wholesale. If you're sure, though, AntiPhotoSpy can clean large batches of photos about as quickly and easily as possible.

Editors' note: This is a review of the trial version of AntiPhotoSpy 2013.