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A Scrambled Exif alternative that works everywhere

What Scrambled Exif is

Scrambled Exif is a free, open-source Android app by Juan Garcia Basilio. It hooks into Android’s share sheet: you share a photo, pick Scrambled Exif, and it deletes the EXIF data before passing the picture on to whatever app you were sending it to.

It is a focused, well-liked tool that makes no network connections at all. If you are on Android and metadata is all you need removed, it is genuinely hard to beat for convenience — it lives exactly where the sharing decision happens.

What Scrambled Exif does well

  • Free and open source, on F-Droid as well as Google Play
  • Sits in the Android share sheet, so it is zero extra steps at the moment you share
  • Makes no network connections whatsoever
  • Deletes metadata rather than obscuring it, and can rename files as well

Where it stops

  • Android only — nothing on iOS, desktop or the web
  • Metadata only: it does not look at what is visible in the picture
  • No faces, no barcodes, no card or ID numbers in the frame
  • Nothing for documents — Word, PDF or spreadsheets
  • It strips without showing you what was there, so you do not learn what the photo was carrying

Side by side

 Scrambled ExifIncognitoShare
PlatformsAndroid onlyAny modern browser — desktop, iOS, Android
Convenience at the moment of sharingIn the Android share sheet — one tapOpen a page and drop the file in
Removes photo metadataYesYes
Shows you what was found firstNo — it strips silentlyYes, with masked previews and what each thing could be used for
Finds things visible in the pictureNoCard numbers, IBANs, passport MRZ, QR codes and barcodes
Finds and covers facesNoYes, optional, on device
Word documentsNoYes — author, comments, tracked changes, hidden text
PDF and ExcelNoBuilt and tested, but not switched on in the website yet
Open sourceYesNo — the detection library is not public today
PriceFreeFree tier; paid plans for higher limits

The bolded cell is the one we think wins each row — including the rows we lose.

Which should you use

If you are on Android, you only care about metadata, and you want it to happen without thinking — keep Scrambled Exif. It is good at that, it is free, and the share-sheet integration is something a website cannot match.

Come here when you are not on Android, when you want to see what a photo was carrying rather than strip it blind, when the problem is a face or a card number in the picture rather than a tag in the file, or when the file is a document rather than a photo.

They are not really the same tool. One is a stripper; this is a checker that also cleans.

Questions

  • No, the detection library is not public today. If that is a requirement for you, that is a real reason to prefer Scrambled Exif and we are not going to argue you out of it. What we do instead is make the privacy claim testable: an automated test records every request the page makes while scanning a real file and fails if any carries the bytes.

Sources

Everything said above about Scrambled Exif comes from its own documentation, so you can check it: