Application Name: Geo Eraser Free
Description: Creates a copy of a photo with geotagging coordinates removed
Publisher’s website: Sakaneya
Cost: Free (ad-supported)
Version/date reviewed: v. 0.22 / 10-17-10
Phone/OS: Droid X / Android 2.2
Android Market link (mobile app only)
Android Market link (browser)
A recent NY Times article told the story of how Mythbuster Adam Savage posted an iPhone photo taken near his house, without realizing that the geographic coordinates for that location were being automatically embedded in the photo (usually referred to as photo “geotagging”). So people could easily find out where he lived, and also know that he wasn’t at home. Most Android phones with GPS come with geotagging turned on as the default, and while you can turn that off, it can be inconvenient to continually turn it on and off (plus you can forget how you last left it). Geo Eraser lets you create an exact copy of a geotagged photo, but with the coordinate information stripped out; it can also optionally remove the photo’s date and time as well.
Figure 1: You never actually run the Geo Eraser app directly; instead, you open a photo with the viewer app of your choice, then “share” it to Geo Eraser.
Figure 2: The photo is displayed at the bottom, and if it has coordinate/date info embedded, that’s shown at the top. The “Location” in China seen at left is a bug – that’s where the photo would be for an eastern longitude the same coordinates as the actual western longitude.
Figure 3: The Menu => Erase Item page lets you set whether the coordinates, date/time or both are to be erased
Figure 4: When ready, just press the “Erase GeoTag” button, and a copy of the original photo will have the unwanted geographic metadata stripped out, and be put into a folder called “Geo Eraser” with the same filename as the original photo. Since some Android phones give photos automatic names that contain the date and time, you may need to rename the photo if you want to completely scrub date/time data out.
Other Issues:
None, apart from the “location” bug mentioned above, which doesn’t affect anything of consequence.
Final thoughts:
Really only does one job, but does it perfectly. Definitely worth having if you’ll ever need to remove photo geotags.