Freeware: Erase The GPS Location Embedded On Your Photos With Photo Detagger

With the release of the Nokia N82 black and the latest firmware update for the N82 titanium color our phones now have the possibility of geotagging all your photos. What this does is embed the exact GPS coordinates in each file so that you can later easily add them to a map for showing off your photos, just like I showed you last month in this post.

Well with this new feature comes a privacy issue. Don't forget if you leave this geotagging setting on every photo you upload to the internet can be downloaded by anyone. They can then view the exif data on the file and see when and where the file was taken. For certain pictures this can be a problem for various personal reasons. Maybe you don't want people to know where you live or where you were when the photo was taken.

One solution is to use a freeware java application called Photo Detagger made by Tea Vui Huang. I learned of this application today when I was reading a very informative post by Ricky at Symbian-Guru about taking your Nseries camera to the next level. What it does is strip down your file's exif data to the bare minimum.


Essentially what it does is converts your jpeg file to a raw format. Here's the exact descrption from the developers website...

With Tea Vui Huang's Photo Detagger on your mobile phone, you can now detag and wipe out all these tags from your photos before sending them out or posting it on the Internet! Previously, the only other way to do this on the phone was to use the phone's photo editor to alter and resave the file, reducing the quality of the photo in the process. Photo Detagger removes the tags without damaging the photos and in the process even reduces the size of the JPEG photos by about 3-5 KBytes as well.

The detagged photos will be saved to the "Images" folder of the microSD card with a "-001" suffix. You can then send out the detagged photos via MMS or upload it as per normal to your preferred photo-sharing websites or blog.

I've tried this out and it works exactly like it says. Only hassle is it can't dig into sub folders so you have to use a file manager on your phone or pc to move the image to the root images folder before Photo Detagger can see the file and do its work. Hopefully they will fix this in a future update to make the process a little easier.

Click here to download Photo Detagger for the Nokia N82.