NearScrub

2026-08-20

Before you post your dorm move-in photos: what campus safety data says about geotagging

Move-in week means the same handful of photos everywhere: a lofted bed half-assembled, a door covered in a name tag and string lights, a caption that tags the dorm or the new apartment complex by name. It's a genuinely nice thing to share — and it's also exactly the kind of photo campus safety offices spend late August reminding students to think twice about, for reasons that have less to do with paranoia than with what a phone camera quietly records alongside the picture.

What campus police actually tell students to do

The advice is consistent across the schools that publish it. The University of Toronto Mississauga's Campus Police runs a standing "Social Media Safety" page that tells students to disable location services and avoid geotagging photos in real time — if you want to tag the coffee shop or the dorm lounge, the advice is to do it after you've already left, not while you're still there. It's a small habit, but it's the same one repeated, in one form or another, across campus safety guidance generally: don't let a photo announce where you are the moment it's true.

Why campuses bother saying this every year

The advice isn't hypothetical. Under the federal Clery Act, every U.S. college and university that receives federal funding has to publish an annual report of campus crime statistics, stalking included — and the last few years of those reports show a real upward trend at more than one school. Stanford's 2025 Safety, Security and Fire Report, covered by the university's own Stanford Report and by the Stanford Daily, recorded 58 stalking reports in 2024, up from 55 in 2023, 41 in 2022, and 30 in 2021. West Virginia University's 2025 Clery Act report shows a similar pattern: stalking reports nearly doubled, from 24 to 42, per WVU's student newspaper, The Daily Athenaeum.

Worth being precise about what that is and isn't evidence of. Stanford's own reporting notes that only 2 of the 58 cases logged in 2024 met California's narrower legal definition of criminal stalking, which requires an immediate, credible threat — Clery Act reporting uses a broader definition than most state criminal codes. Campus officials quoted in that same coverage attribute part of the increase to more awareness and more reporting through Title IX, not necessarily a rise in incidents alone. None of this proves that any specific photo's metadata caused any specific case — it's context for why "don't broadcast exactly where you live" is standing advice at multiple schools rather than a one-off scare.

Two different things get called "geotagging," and only one lives in the file

Campus safety pages tend to lump two separate things under one word, and the fix for each is completely different.

Two things people call "geotagging" ✓ Baked into the file — NearScrub clears it EXIF GPS coordinates, recorded automatically if location was on Camera make/model, XMP, IPTC fields riding in the file Invisible — you can't see it by looking at the picture itself ✕ Typed by you — no scrubber touches it A location tag or check-in added to the caption itself A building name, street sign, or room number visible in the shot Content decisions — cropping or not typing it, not a file fix
Campus safety advice to "avoid geotagging" usually covers both columns at once. Only the left column is metadata sitting inside the photo's own bytes — which is the part a scrubber like NearScrub can actually remove.

What NearScrub actually clears from a move-in photo

Drop a JPEG or PNG onto NearScrub and it runs entirely inside the browser tab — nothing uploads anywhere, which is worth noting specifically here, since a photo tied to a brand-new home address is exactly the kind of file you shouldn't want passing through an unknown third-party server just to get the location data off it. For a JPEG, NearScrub drops the whole EXIF block, including any GPS coordinates, along with XMP metadata, IPTC/Photoshop fields, and comment segments, while leaving the actual picture untouched. For a PNG it clears the equivalent text and timestamp chunks. The same applies to whatever paperwork tends to travel alongside move-in week — a renter's insurance application, a roommate agreement, a forwarding-address form — where a PDF's Info dictionary and XMP stream, or a Word or Excel file's docProps (author, company, last-modified-by, custom properties), can carry a name or an employer that has nothing to do with the document's actual content. A report shows what NearScrub found in each file before anything is cleared, and a batch of files comes back as a single zip.

The iPhone catch

Worth stating plainly, since it's the camera most students already have in their pocket: an iPhone's default photo format since iOS 11 has been HEIF, saved as a .heic file — still the default capture format on current devices per Apple's own support documentation. NearScrub reads JPEG, PNG, PDF, and Office files; it doesn't parse HEIC. A move-in photo pulled straight from an iPhone's camera roll and dropped onto NearScrub as-is will come back unsupported, with nothing actually removed. The fix is usually already in place without anyone noticing it: Apple's documentation says sharing HEIF media "using other methods, such as AirDrop, Messages, or email" to a device that doesn't support the newer format converts it "in a more compatible format, such as JPEG," automatically — so a photo that's already been texted to a parent or a friend is often a JPEG by the time it comes back. If it isn't, Settings → Camera → Formats → Most Compatible switches new photos to JPEG going forward. Either way, check the file extension before assuming a photo was scrubbed when NearScrub never actually got to read it.

A one-time habit for move-in week

None of this requires giving up the dorm-tour post. It just means doing the two jobs in the right order: decide what's acceptable to have visible in the frame — that part is a look-before-you-post call, same as the campus safety pages ask — and separately, before the photo goes anywhere, run it through NearScrub so the GPS coordinates and everything else riding invisibly in the file are gone. Do it once, before the first photo goes out, and every photo from that device for the rest of the semester starts from a file that isn't quietly telling anyone who checks exactly where you live now.