Remove EXIF data before sharing a picture in Android

I found a neat little Android app the other day that removes EXIF data from pictures before you share them. It’s called Scrambled Exif and it’s available on F-Droid. The name is a bit misleading, since it really does remove EXIF data altogether instead of just scrambling it.

The way it works is simple: when using the share menu with a picture in Android, select Scrambled Exif instead of the destination app where you want the picture shared. Scrambled Exif removes the metadata and displays another share menu, where you choose where the EXIF-less picture should go. And yes, it works for multiple images too!

This might not be necessary, since popular messaging apps such as WhatsApp and Discord seem to use tools like oxipng and jpegoptim (covered in this post!) to compress images and remove metadata before they are sent. But you never know, maybe the EXIF data is actually read and stored somewhere before compression… That wouldn’t even surprise me to be honest.