Jun 01, 2020 19:00:00

'Image Scrubber' that can easily delete Exif information of photos, write and blur

If you publish the photo taken with your smartphone as it is, information such as the date and time the photo was taken and the name of the device will remain, and there is a possibility that the individual will be identified. In some cases, it may be necessary to blur the subject. In such a case, the browser-based image processing service ' Image Scrubber ' can easily perform processing. All the processing is completed on the browser, and the unprocessed photos are not stored or sent to any server, so I actually tried using it.

Image Scrubber

https://everestpipkin.github.io/image-scrubber/

'Image Scrubber' looks like this. It can be accessed from both PC and smartphone.

Select 'Open image' in the upper left and select the image you want to process. In addition to the JPEG format, which is the basic format for photographs taken with digital cameras and smartphones, it also supports PNG format and WebP format.

When you open an image, the

Exif information saved in the file is read first. This includes the name of the terminal that took the picture, the shooting date / time, location information, camera settings such as shutter speed and exposure at the time of shooting, and for example, uploaded a photo of the scene of the Minneapolis riot to SNS. Sometimes it can be combined with other information to identify who was shooting. Exif information is deleted by clicking 'Scrub Exif Data'.

When the information is deleted, a confirmation dialog will be displayed, so click 'OK'.

Image editing can be done after processing the Exif information. For example, in the case of a photo that should have been taken in portrait orientation but is lying sideways, click 'Rotate Image'.

Rotate 90 degrees clockwise with each click.

If you select 'Paint', you can write on the image with a brush. If this is OK, you can save it with 'Save image'.

If unsuccessful, select 'Undo' and trace the part processed with the brush in the same way to cancel the processing of the corresponding part.

Blurring can be done with 'Blur'.

The size of the brush and the strength of the blur can be changed with the slider at the top.

The source code of 'Image Scrubber' is available on GitHub.

GitHub-everestpipkin / image-scrubber: A tool for anonymizing photographs taken at protests
https://github.com/everestpipkin/image-scrubber