Lea asks: How do you: A-find all that metadata in these images? How do we: B-strip it out before posting? I'm curious. Lea A couple of things - Hexedit is a geeky tool that lets you see what a file is made of - you can do things with it, but to keep it simple, you can just use it to peek inside the file. If it's all goobledegook then it's likely all image, if you see line after line after line of Adobe this, Adobe that, Canon blah blah, ICC profile something-or-other Apple is Kewwl, Windows sucks etc then you've non-image information in that there jpeg that could easily come out, giving you more picture for your picture :) hexedit in various flavours of PC (apple,Windoze,Linux etc) can be found here:http://hexedit.sourceforge.net/ and here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/hexedit/ it's a bit over half a megabyte. you don't need it, but it can be fun to have a go with and delete the program after you've finnished playing - or keep it - it's small enough. I use Irfanview to see the basic IPTC info and EXIF data in a simpler, more readable form by pressing 'I' (which shows file information, exif and iptc info is on buttons, bottom left) Irfanview is 1Mb and free from www.irfanview.com . Incidentally, Irfanview can be used to *write* comments and copyright to files rather nicely - handy for searching stored images now the complicated bit (which isn't really) - removing the 'stuff'. I use a teeny little command line program called 'jhead'. command lines can be confusing for people (seriously) so I wrote a batch script to make it dead easy to use. here's info about jhead and what it can do (far more than I need!) ..and it's also available for any brand of PC (including the apple people, welcome to the PC fold guys! ;) freeware, it comes in at between 50 and 100kb http://www.sentex.net/~mwandel/jhead/ How I make it work in windows: OPTION A:: 1. I download the file and put it in it's own folder on C: calling it CLEANER, also creating a sub folder called 'thumbnails' 2. then I wrote a batch file in notepad with the following 3 lines: @echo off jhead -st "thumbnails\&i" *.jpg jhead -purejpg *.jpg if you want to try this, copy the above 3 lines into a blank notepad file and save and call it clean.bat (not clean.bat.txt!) 3. (optional) Windows trick >> Next I create a shortcut to this folder on my desktop by left clicking the silly folder icon, top left of the open window, and dragging it to my desktop - you can do this for any folder or webpage :) 4. when I want to use it, I copy all the images I want cleaned into the folder then double click the clean.bat file magically, all the files get scrubbed clean and any thumbnails (one per image even if there are more) are dumped into the 'thumbnails' folder for you to peek at and see what the original image looked like as sometimes is the case.. you can then compare the files where you copied them from to these newly cleaned images and see the size difference :) OPTION B:: (i've done the above and all you need do is download http://members.iinet.net.au/~shahjen/jpeg_cleaner.zip extract it and **read the readme file** - no seriously - read it! then go nuts :) it's about 100kb and all the work is done for you hope this is of use karl
