Our products are used all over the world by a huge number of talented engineers. They help them to produce better cameras and to get their customers satisfied. A lot of these engineers work on products that have not been revealed to the public yet and they have to take care that no one will know about the product before official release.
If the camera is close to a final product, it will already write image files that contain EXIF information and this information can be easily read from the image.
In Photoshop, you can easily see the “Make” and Model” tag of the EXIF data.
The iQ-Analyzer, our Image Quality Analyzing Tool, reads these information and uses some of them for calculations and reference in the result files.
So what to do, if you have images taken by a camera that is strictly confidential, but you want to send some images to e.g. our support team to discuss the results you have obtained?
A very easy and convenient way is to use “ExifTool by Phil Harvey”.
This tool can be downloaded here: http://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/ or if you use the iQ-Analyzer, you will find it in the “3rdParty” Folder.
Used on the command line, you can change the entries in the EXIF data section of the image files to some random data, that can not be traced back to your company or the camera you are working on.
For example with this call in the terminal (Mac OS X) or command line (Windows) accordingly will:
exiftool -Make="XXX" -Model="YYY" -Software="ZZZ" /Data/ExifTest/myImage.JPG
If you now check, you see the new entries:
So now we have changes the Metadata of the file, but did we make sure not to change the image data itself? To make sure, we compare the “before” and “after” image in imageJ:
We subtract “myImage_modified.JPG” from “myImage_original.JPG”. If they are identical, this should result in a “0” for all pixel.
As we see, all pixel in the image have the value 0, so the image itself has not been changed by modifying the EXIF data.
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