Image Redaction & Metadata Cleaner

Drawing the boxes

The boxes are solid fills painted over the copy, so any part of the original that still shows inside a box is still visible in the result. Extend each box well past the edges of what you are hiding rather than tracing it. A card number with the first and last digits left outside the box is still readable from the shape of what remains, and a face with the ears showing is still a face.

Covering a face is a judgement call rather than a rule. If the face could identify someone, cover the whole of it including hair and ears. If the picture needs to be useful as a picture, a covered face may defeat the purpose, and the better answer is usually to crop the picture differently or not to use it.

Covering is not cropping

These are different operations and are confused more often than any other. Cropping removes a region of the picture entirely, so nothing is left to recover. Covering leaves the original pixels underneath, and re-drawing them over is a change to the visible surface, not a deletion of what was there. Where the information is genuinely sensitive, cropping is the stronger choice.

Your original file is not modified

Everything happens on a copy held in the page. Your downloaded file is a separate image, the original on your disk is untouched, and you can start again as often as you like.

Why metadata is removed by drawing rather than by editing fields

When a picture is re-drawn, the result is a new file assembled pixel by pixel. The blocks of information that hold EXIF data, GPS coordinates, camera serial numbers and timestamps are not carried across, because they are properties of the original file rather than of the picture itself.

That is a stronger position than clearing the fields a tool happens to recognise. Editing metadata can rewrite a field and leave the original block in place, which is how a location supposedly removed from a photo turns out still to be in it. A file that was drawn afresh has nothing to find.

What is usually in there

A phone photo commonly carries GPS coordinates, the device name, a timestamp, the camera and lens model, and sometimes a serial number. A screenshot of a photo carries the same data, because taking a picture of a picture does not strip anything. If you are posting a photo taken at home, at a school, or at work, that is the detail most worth removing.

For a screenshot rather than a photograph

The same reasoning applies to a picture of a document, a receipt, or a screen. Anything legible in the frame is in the frame, and on a screenshot the text is always legible. Check the corners as well, where notification badges, tab titles and account names tend to sit.