Sharing photos safely

With digital cameras and camera phones we’ve entered a wonderful new age of sharing and documenting everyday life and events as they occur. Cell phones with cameras are with many of us all the time and the quality of the cameras is rapidly improving. With the explosion of blogs; mobile blogs (called moblogs); photo sharing sites; personal Web sites; and image sharing in e-mails and IM, sharing photos and videos has never been easier.

Managing who sees your digital images, from photos to videos, is critical to avoiding the potential exposure of private or personal information to people outside your trusted friends and family. The same pictures and videos you want to share with friends and family may contain information that also has value to criminals.

Only use reputable sites, and only share photos that contain identifiable information with people you trust.

To make photos with identifiable information safer to share publicly:

1. Use a photo editing tool such as Windows Photo Gallery to cover up or crop out information that could put you at risk -- for example the house number, your street sign, and so on. You may also choose to blur small sections.

2. Strip metadata from the photo. Some sites allow viewers to see the settings used to take the photo, the time and date when the photo was taken, and even show the geographical coordinates of the place where the photo was taken if the camera or camera phone documents this information. This means a photo taken in your backyard may provide others with information they can use to locate your home.

3. Reduce the resolution of the photo – lower resolution makes it less likely that others will copy the photo.