MetaScrub

That photo knows where you live.
That document remembers who wrote it.

Before you send a file out, MetaScrub audits it for the data you cannot see: the GPS coordinates in a photo, the camera serial number, the thumbnail of the part you cropped away, the author and revision history in a Word file, the producer data in a PDF. Then it removes that data, writes a cleaned copy, and hands you a report that proves — per file — that the result is zero. Your originals are never touched.

Get MetaScrub — $19 one-time

Three privacy risks hiding in files you already send

The GPS tag is your home address. A phone photo carries the exact coordinates where it was taken. Post it, and anyone can read where you live, where your kids go to school, where the listing photos were shot.
The thumbnail remembers what you cropped out. Cropping a photo does not always remove the original — an embedded EXIF thumbnail can still carry the uncropped image. MetaScrub strips the whole EXIF block, thumbnail included.
The revision history tells the story you deleted. A Word file can carry its author, your company, how many revisions it went through, and the fingerprints of every editing session. Sending the "final" version can still hand over the draft history.

The report is the product — find, remove, verify zero

Other metadata cleaners finish with a bare list of "successful" files — no detail about what was actually removed. MetaScrub gives you a per-file triple instead:

Found — every hidden item named: GPS coordinates, BodySerialNumber, author, company, revision traces, XMP metadata, and more.
Removed — what the scrub took out of the cleaned copy.
Rechecked zero — the cleaned copy is audited again, and the report must read 0 target items remaining. If it does not, you see it.

And the content itself is verified untouched: photo pixels are hash-checked, document and PDF text are hash-checked, and every cleaned file is verified to still open.

What it covers

File type	What is audited	What scrubbing does
JPEG photos	GPS coordinates, camera Make/Model, serial numbers, software, artist, dates, embedded EXIF thumbnail	Strips the whole EXIF block at byte level; pixels never re-encoded
Word / Excel / PowerPoint	Author, last editor, revision number, company, custom properties, revision traces (rsid attributes)	Empties author/editor, resets revision, empties company, removes custom properties, strips rsid attributes; body text untouched
PDF	Author, Creator, Producer, Title, Subject, Keywords, XMP metadata	Empties info-dictionary fields and XMP metadata; page text untouched

Before / after — our seeded acceptance test, measured

	Before	After MetaScrub
JPEG with GPS + serial + thumbnail	9 hidden items found, including GPS 37.77500, -122.41944 and serial SN-TEST-12345	0 items remaining; decoded-pixel hash unchanged
DOCX with author + company + revision traces	6 finding groups, including author Jane Author, Company Acme Corp, revision 7, 4 rsid attributes	0 items remaining; file still opens; body-text hash unchanged
PDF with Author + Producer + XMP	7 hidden items found	0 items remaining; file still opens; page-text hash unchanged
PDF carrying a signature field	Signature field present (/FT /Sig marker, signature flags 3)	Skipped, not scrubbed — no cleaned copy produced, report states the skip explicitly
Your original files	untouched	untouched (SHA-256 verified in testing, 4/4 files)

Full seeded acceptance run: 35/35 checks passed. Scan-only mode writes nothing — audit first, scrub when you are ready.

How it works

Point MetaScrub at a folder of photos, Office files and PDFs
Run a scan-only report first if you like; it writes nothing
Or scrub: get cleaned copies in a new folder plus the find, remove, verify-zero report, and send the cleaned copies instead

Windows 10/11. No account, no subscription, no upload — the whole point is that your files never leave your computer.