The default is deliberately not maximum paranoia. --strict is, and it has a visible cost. This is how to choose.
Three segments change verdict under --strict: the ICC colour profile, the JFIF header, and the Adobe APP14 marker. Everything else is dropped either way. Run the dry run twice to see the difference on your own file.
$ scrubpony -n photo.jpg keep APP0 14 JFIF keep APP2 602 ICC profile $ scrubpony -n --strict photo.jpg drop APP0 14 JFIF (density is weakly fingerprintable) drop APP2 602 ICC profile (uncommon profiles narrow the source)
Dropping the ICC profile visibly shifts colour on a wide-gamut display, because the viewer must now guess a colour space and will guess sRGB. Dropping the Adobe segment can break CMYK and YCCK colour interpretation. Dropping JFIF removes the pixel density, which can affect how an image is sized when printed or placed.
The gain is real but modest: an unusual ICC profile narrows down the device or software that produced the file, and JFIF density does the same more weakly. That matters when a file is going somewhere adversarial and it matters very little when you are posting a photo of a bicycle for sale. This is a per-situation call, not a setting to turn on and forget.
Scrub one photograph both ways and look at them side by side on the display you care about. If you cannot tell them apart, use --strict freely. If you can, decide which cost you would rather pay.
$ scrubpony --strict -r -d ~/clean ~/Pictures/to-upload
scrubpony -n --strict shows JFIF, ICC and Adobe as dropped.No, and deliberately so. A default that changes how photographs look would be a default most people would be surprised by, and surprising a user of a privacy tool is how you lose them. The site says the default is not maximum paranoia rather than implying it is.
No. Everything else in the policy table is already dropped by default, unrecognised vendor segments included.
That is a separate flag. --no-keep-orientation drops the 36-byte block ScrubPony writes back, and your rotated photos will then display sideways.
Strips identifying metadata out of JPEGs without touching a pixel. C99, no dependencies beyond libc, macOS and Linux, MIT-licensed.