I recall reading that the way the images are stored (for efficiency's sake) makes their deletion difficult. This analogy may not be all that correct, but I thi

I recall reading that the way the images are stored (for efficiency's sake) makes their deletion difficult. This analogy may not be all that correct, but I think of them as part of an archive in a fashion where their removal means rewriting part if not all of the much larger archive. This is probably too simplistic, but the information caused me to wonder whether it would be practical to overwrite them in-place with equivalently sized data that represent a pure white or black image containing no metadata (EXIF, etc.). Data traces might be left, e.g. file name, perhaps some indexing (are metadata indexed?), but the image itself would essentially be gone.