What a file says about you
Read the metadata out, or take it off before you send the file.
- See and remove image metadataRead out everything a photo records about its own making, then rebuild the file without it.
- Encode an image as Base64Encode a picture as Base64 and read back what it cost: the character count, the overhead to one decimal place, and whether the file is small enough that inlining it is worth doing.
About these tools
A photograph from a phone carries more than the picture. The camera model, the exposure, the moment it was taken, often the exact place, sometimes the owner's name and the software that touched it last. None of it is visible when you look at the image, and all of it travels with the file into whatever you attach it to.
Most of the time that is harmless and occasionally it is not: a location on a photograph of your own front door, a timestamp that contradicts what you told somebody, a serial number shared across every picture you have ever posted. The useful move is to look first and decide second, which is why reading the metadata and removing it are the same page here rather than two.
Stripping is done by rebuilding the file without the segments that carry the data, so the pixels are the pixels that went in. Anything that changes the picture would be a different tool with a different name, and re-encoding a photograph to clean it is a cost nobody asked for.