The photo of the bike. And your address.

Where this actually bites

The everyday cases are the ones that catch people, because there is no moment where it feels like a security decision:

• Selling something online. A photo taken at home, posted publicly, to an audience that by definition includes strangers who want to come and collect it.
• Posting to a forum or a hobby community. Months of photographs from the same place, adding up to a map.
• Sending a picture of a document. The coordinates come along, and so does the uncropped thumbnail if you cropped anything out.
• Sharing photos of children. The school gate, the park, the front door, each with a timestamp.

Some platforms strip metadata on upload. Some do not. Some strip it from the version they display and keep the original. You cannot tell which from the outside, and you cannot undo an upload that did not.

What ScrubPony changes

• One command over the folder you are about to upload. scrubpony -r -d ~/clean ~/Pictures/to-upload gives you a clean copy with the same names and structure. The originals are not touched.
• It tells you what it found. The summary counts how many files carried GPS. That number is usually higher than people expect, and it is the whole reason the line prints even when nothing went wrong.
• Your portrait photos stay upright. A 36-byte orientation block is written back automatically, so you do not end up with a folder of sideways photographs — which is the reason most people abandon metadata strippers.
• Colours do not shift. The ICC profile is kept by default.
• The picture is untouched. No re-encoding, no quality loss, so the clean copy is as good as the original.

The quickest version

If you only ever run two commands, make them these:

• scrubpony -n -r ~/Pictures/to-upload — look at what is in there. It writes nothing.
• scrubpony -r -d ~/clean ~/Pictures/to-upload — make a clean copy and upload from ~/clean.

Also worth doing once, on your phone: turn off location for the camera, so the next few years of photographs do not need this at all.

Honest limits

The command-line tool needs a Mac or a Linux computer. If your photographs live only on your phone, there is now a ScrubPony app for Android that scrubs on the device itself, with no network and no permissions. On an iPhone there is no app yet (iOS is in development), so the built-in "remove location" option in the share sheet is the realistic answer for now — and here is exactly what it does and does not cover. A tool you will not use protects nothing.

It handles JPEG, PNG, WebP and HEIC — including the HEICs most phones now shoot by default — so there is no need to export to another format first. RAW, TIFF, AVIF and video are reported and skipped rather than cleaned.

Most importantly: this does not make a photograph anonymous. It removes the labels, not what is in the picture. A house number, a street sign, a reflection in a window, a school uniform, or a distinctive view out of the back is all still there, and no tool can help with that. Look at the picture before you post it.

And it cannot help with what has already gone. Scrub before you share, not afterwards.

Common questions.