PSA: Remove your location when uploading pictures to bearblog (fixed!)

31 Aug, 2024

TL;DR: Bearblog doesn't (currently) strip location data from your uploads, so you need to do it yourself

UPDATE: Herman just added a comment in the nolt suggestion that locations are now removed, and there is a corresponding commit.

A new uploaded photo shows that EXIF metadata (including location) is now removed:

Thanks Herman for the fast work! 💨

I noticed that bear blog posts with pictures were loading rather slowly - turns out images are being stored and served as-is, full-sized and all.

This is probably a Good Thing™ for people running photo blogs, but I also realised that photo metadata, including your location, are being retained - not something you would want, e.g. if your pictures were taken at home.

If you have posted images via the native bearblog insert image feature in the past, it is a good idea to check that your location hasn't been inadvertently leaked.

Also, if you would like this to be solved for everyone, please help to upvote the suggestion to preprocess images.

EDIT: Herman has marked this suggestion as ‘planned’ ＼ʕ •ᴥ•ʔ／

Thanks everyone for upvoting this issue!

Android

I'm not too sure how to this natively in Android (do let me know if you have an elegant way to remove location data!) - I'm wary to recommend any of the numerous apps that seem to do this, as I'm not sure which of them can be trusted.

EDIT: Jd dropped me an email recommending Aves (F-Droid|Github) for Android :-

Just saw your post and I was thinking to write the same a few days ago.

To remove metadata on your android phone, Aves is a really good gallery app. You can edit all of your metadata and also sort images in different ways.

It is available on playstore as well as fdroid.

Thanks for the recommendation! I haven't been in touch with the Android ecosystem for a while, and it's great to see photo/file manager apps which are not riddled with ads.