NearScrub

2026-09-27

Your phone's "Remove Location" toggle and Windows' "Remove Properties" button don't remove what their names promise

Most people who bother to think about photo privacy already believe they have a fix for it built in: their phone or their computer has a button for it. iPhone's share sheet has a Location toggle. Google Photos has a way to edit a photo's location. Windows has a right-click menu item literally called "Remove Properties and Personal Information." The names invite an assumption — that flipping the switch gets you a clean file. Apple's and Google's own documentation, and one security researcher's byte-level test of the Windows feature, all describe something narrower than that.

Apple's own guide describes the iPhone toggle as a location feature, and nothing more

Share a photo from the iOS Photos app, tap "Options," and there's a toggle for Location. Turn it off and the interface confirms it with "Location Not Included" above the button, according to Apple's own Personal Safety guide. That guide, and the toggle's own name, describe the feature in exactly one register: whether the person you're sharing with can see where the photo was taken. Neither the label nor Apple's documentation makes any claim about the file's other EXIF fields — camera make and model, lens, exposure settings, and the exact date and time of capture all live in the same EXIF block as the GPS tag, in separate entries the toggle was never named after. The setting isn't sticky, either: it has to be turned off on every individual share, because iOS has no global default that applies it automatically. A tool named and documented as a location toggle isn't overpromising by leaving the rest of the block alone — but it also isn't doing what "remove the metadata" would mean if you assumed the two were the same thing.

Google Photos can't even touch the location your own camera wrote

Google draws an even sharper line, and states it plainly in its own help documentation rather than leaving it implied. Google's support page on photo locations puts it this way: "You can only change or remove estimated locations and locations that you manually added to your photos... If a location was automatically added by your camera, you can't update or remove the location in Google Photos." That's not a workaround or a known bug — it's Google's own description of what the feature is scoped to do. The location-editing tools in Google Photos operate one layer above the file: they change what Google's interface displays and what an album or shared link shows other viewers, not the GPS tag your phone wrote into the JPEG at the moment of capture. The same page adds that when a photo leaves Google Photos some other way — attached to an email, for instance — "the original location your device saved shows without any edits you made in Google Photos." An edit made inside the app doesn't travel with the file. The original embedded data does.

Windows' "Remove Properties and Personal Information" leaves the actual bytes behind

Windows takes a different, and arguably worse, path to a similarly incomplete result. Right-click a photo, open Properties → Details, and click "Remove Properties and Personal Information," and Explorer offers a dialog that reports removing fields like Camera Maker and Camera Model. Security researcher Didier Stevens tested what that dialog actually produces at the byte level — using a binary template editor and his own JPEG-parsing tool — on fully patched copies of Windows 7, 10, and 11. His finding: Explorer deletes the DIRENTRY structures, the property system's references to a field, but leaves the StrAscii structures — the actual string values — physically present in the file's APP1 segment. In his test, Explorer reported Camera Maker, Camera Model, and Software as removed, while the literal text "Canon" and a GIMP software tag were still sitting inside the file, recoverable by anything that reads the raw segment bytes instead of trusting Explorer's own property index. A separate review by Digital Confidence, a company that builds metadata-removal tools for law firms, catalogued the same feature's gaps across more file types: tracked changes, comments, and hidden text in Word documents survive it untouched, and it doesn't support PDF or WAV files at all. Neither review reports a fix in a later Windows release.

Three "remove metadata" buttons, three different gaps IPHONE/ANDROID SHARE → "LOCATION" OFF Clears GPS for that one share only. Camera model, lens, and timestamp stay — and it resets before the next photo. GOOGLE PHOTOS → EDIT/REMOVE LOCATION Only reaches Google's own estimate or a pin you added. A location your camera wrote, Google's help page says, it "can't update or remove." WINDOWS → REMOVE PROPERTIES AND PERSONAL INFO Clears the property reference shown in the dialog. A 2022 byte-level test found the actual values — make, model, software — still physically in the file.
All three interfaces promise to remove something. What each is actually scoped to reach — and, in Windows' case, whether it fully reaches even that — differs from what the button's name suggests.

The pattern: a reference gets cleared, not always the data behind it

All three cases share a shape, even though the specific gap differs. Apple's and Google's tools are scoped to location by design, and their own documentation says so; Windows' tool claims to remove properties generally and, per Stevens' test, doesn't fully do that either. None of this is a broken promise so much as a mismatch between what a UI toggle was built to do and what "clean the file" sounds like it should mean. It's also why a full scrub needs to work differently, not just more thoroughly: for JPEG and PNG, NearScrub doesn't clear a reference to a metadata field — it walks the file's actual segment or chunk structure and rebuilds the output from only the parts it keeps. A dropped EXIF or IPTC segment isn't a cleared pointer sitting next to orphaned bytes; it's bytes that were never copied into the output at all. The same happens to a PDF's Info dictionary entries and XMP stream, and to an Office file's docProps parts. All of it runs in the browser, before the file goes anywhere.

What that still doesn't cover

Being specific about what a full scrub reaches means being specific about what it doesn't. It removes embedded file metadata; it has no effect on what's visible in the photo itself — a street sign or a house number in frame reads exactly the same before and after. It doesn't process HEIC, the default capture format on newer iPhones, or video files today; a HEIC photo needs to be exported or converted to JPEG or PNG first. And running it on a file doesn't retroactively reach any copy you already sent before scrubbing — the fix has to happen before the file leaves your device, not after. What it changes is the one part actually inside your control: what's still in the file the moment before you hit send.