No. 08 · Class of 2026
PhotoBench
The BlueberryFor services to discretion: has cut more location tags off photos than any other berry.
Say cheese. Not your address
The plaque
- Stage name
- The Blueberry
- Instrument
- A camera lens: the berry is the barrel, its crown is the aperture.
- Day job
- Shows and removes the hidden data in photos, such as the GPS location and the phone’s serial number, shows on the map where a photo was taken, and compresses and converts images to JPEG, WebP or AVIF, all without uploading them.
- Signature move
- Cutting the metadata out of a JPEG without re-compressing it: the pixels stay exactly the same.
- Plays with
- The location tag (on its way out), WhereBench (gets the places it finds).
- Debut
- October 1, 2026, 56 minutes after the onion
- Inducted
- October 10, 2026
The original
The logo you see on the site, in colour.
- The blueberry is the barrel of a lens; the crown every real blueberry has becomes the blades of the aperture.
- A tag with a location pin hangs from the stem, its thread cut: the metadata is coming off.
- The pale waxy bloom on the skin is the one real blueberries have.
On paper
The black-and-white version from the blog comics. Model sheet:
- calm
- say cheese
- shocked
- sly
Biography
A blueberry already has a crown on top, five little points around a hole. It took one look in the mirror and decided it was an aperture. Since then it has been a lens with one eye of its own, and the tag hanging from its stem is a photo’s location, on its way out.
A photo straight from a phone often carries the exact place, the date, the phone model and its serial number. PhotoBench shows all of it, removes what you choose and, for JPEG, PNG and WebP, cuts the data out without touching a single pixel. It also compresses and converts to JPEG, WebP or AVIF. Photos are opened by your browser and never uploaded; the map loads only when you ask for it.
In the comics the blueberry so far has one cameo: it sits on the bench with one hand up and one on its hip. For its induction it got the waxy bloom of the logo under its mouth, because a smile drawn on a dark berry was all but invisible.
Greatest hits
Where to catch it in the blog comics:
- Our principles: sits on the bench, one hand up and one on its hip.
- The Hall of Fame is open: protests: only by 56 minutes; then shoots the model sheets with its lens eye.