Local Windows utility
Privacy Scrub
Every photo your phone takes records where you were standing when you took it. Inspect what a file is actually carrying, then remove the location, the camera details, or everything — before it goes to a marketplace listing, a forum post, or a group chat.
Scrubbed copies land in the folder you pick, so the originals keep their data if you need it.
What it's for
Real jobs — Privacy Scrub
Not feature bullets — the actual situations people open this for.
- Selling something online without publishing the coordinates of your house.
- Posting photos of your children without the school or the park attached.
- Sending images to a client with the camera body and serial number removed.
- Checking what a photo someone sent you is carrying.
- Clearing metadata from a whole folder before it goes anywhere.
What it does
Everything Privacy Scrub handles
Everything below runs on your own machine, on as many files as you give it.
Strip the location
Remove GPS coordinates and leave everything else intact — often exactly what you want, since the date and camera settings are harmless and useful.
Strip the camera details
Make, model, lens, serial number and settings. Useful when the equipment itself is what you would rather not publish.
Strip everything
Remove all metadata and hand back a file that carries nothing but pixels.
Inspect before you decide
See exactly what is in a file — coordinates, timestamps, device, software — in plain language, before you remove any of it.
A folder at a time
Scrub a whole directory in one run. No uploading a private photo to a website to find out what is inside it, which rather defeats the purpose.
Automatic on the way out
Make it a rule: anything that lands in your Shared folder gets its metadata stripped before you have a chance to forget.
How it works
From drop to done
- 1
Drop in your photos
One file or a folder. Nothing is sent anywhere to be examined.
- 2
See what they are carrying
PhotoTray lists the metadata it found — including whether there is a location in there.
- 3
Choose what to remove
Location only, camera details, or everything. Scrubbed copies are written where you choose and the originals stay as they are.
Under the hood
The engines, named
How metadata is read and how it is removed.
- Reading
- exifr — EXIF, GPS and XMP from HEIC, RAW, JPEG, TIFF, PNG
- Removing
- sharp (libvips) — rewrites the image without the metadata
- Scope
- GPS only, camera details only, or everything
- Platform
- Windows 10/11 (x64) — your photos are never uploaded to be inspected
One limitation stated plainly, because getting it wrong would be the worst failure in this tool: removing metadata means rewriting the file without it, and PhotoTray can read HEIC but cannot write it. A HEIC is therefore scrubbed and converted to JPG, or it is declined with an explanation. It will never hand back a HEIC that looks cleaned and still carries your location.
The rest of the belt
It ships with five more
Questions
Privacy Scrub, answered
Get the whole tray — Privacy Scrub
Privacy Scrub comes with PhotoTray — free for Windows 10 and 11, with the other five alongside it.