Terms of Use.
Plain terms for a plain deal: the tool is free and MIT-licensed, it runs entirely on your own machine, and it makes specific promises rather than sweeping ones.
Last updated: July 29, 2026
The agreement
These terms cover this website. The scrubpony software itself is governed by its own licence — the MIT licence, in the LICENSE file of the repository — and where these terms and that licence disagree about the software, the licence wins. ScrubPony is developed by NorseHorse, an independent developer ("the developer").
The software
ScrubPony is a command line tool that removes metadata segments from JPEG files. It runs entirely on your own computer. There is no service, no relay, no account, and no network component: nothing you scrub is transmitted anywhere, because the program has no code that could transmit it. It is free of charge and free to modify and redistribute under the MIT licence.
What it promises
ScrubPony makes specific, testable claims — that the entropy-coded image data is copied verbatim, that writes are atomic, that unrecognised segments are dropped rather than kept. Those claims are documented on the guarantees page and are checkable from the verification page.
What it does not promise
It does not make your photographs anonymous. It removes container metadata; it cannot touch anything encoded in the pixels themselves — an invisible watermark, a reflection, a visible street sign, a face. It handles JPEG only. It does not guarantee that pre-scrub bytes are unrecoverable from your storage medium afterwards. Read the limits before relying on it in a situation where being wrong would matter.
Your files, your responsibility
-i replaces originals in place. That operation is atomic, but it is still a replacement: keep a backup of anything irreplaceable before running any tool over a whole library, this one included. The developer cannot recover a file you overwrote.
Acceptable use
Use ScrubPony lawfully. Removing metadata from images you have no right to alter, or doing so to obstruct a legal process, is your problem rather than the tool's, and nothing here should be read as advice that it is permissible.
No warranty
ScrubPony is provided "as is", without warranty of any kind, express or implied, as stated in the MIT licence. To the maximum extent permitted by law, the developer is not liable for any indirect, incidental, or consequential damages arising from use of the software or this website.
This website
The site is informational. Its content may change as the tool evolves; the documentation describes the released version stated in the footer, and older versions may behave differently.
Changes
These terms may be updated as the tool evolves; updates appear on this page with a new date. Continued use after an update constitutes acceptance.