Privacy Buddy
Every photo you send carries more than the picture. Tucked inside the file are the GPS
coordinates of where it was taken, the exact minute you took it, your phone's model and
serial number, the camera settings, and sometimes your name. Post it, message it, or upload
it, and all of that travels with it.
Privacy Buddy strips that out before you share.
ONE TAP, FROM ANYWHERE
No importing, no library to manage. In Photos — or Files, Messages, or any app with a share
button — tap Share and choose Privacy Buddy. Your files are cleaned in a moment and a share
sheet opens with the clean copies, ready to send wherever you were headed.
YOU CHOOSE WHAT GOES
Six switches, all on by default. Turn off any you want to keep:
• Location — GPS coordinates and place names
• Camera details — lens, exposure, ISO and other shot settings
• Device info — make, model and serial numbers
• Date & time taken — when the media was captured
• Software info — the apps used to capture or edit
• Author & comments — names, captions, keywords and copyright
Keeping the timestamp but dropping the location? That's two taps.
NOTHING LEAVES YOUR DEVICE
There is no server. There is no account, no sign-up, no email address. Your photos are never
uploaded, and Privacy Buddy collects nothing about you — no analytics, no tracking, no ads.
Cleaning happens entirely on your iPhone or iPad, so it works in airplane mode.
YOUR ORIGINALS STAY UNTOUCHED
Privacy Buddy never edits or deletes what's in your library. It makes a clean copy, hands it
to the share sheet, and deletes its working copy afterwards. Nothing is kept — no history of
what you cleaned, no cached thumbnails of your media.
WORKS WITH YOUR FILES
Photos: JPEG, PNG, HEIC/HEIF, TIFF, GIF and RAW.
Video and audio: MP4, MOV and other common formats.
Video is cleaned without re-encoding wherever possible, so quality and file size are
preserved.
A NOTE ON VIDEO
For video and audio, Apple's frameworks strip identifying metadata as a single unit rather
than category by category, so the six switches above apply to photos. Videos come out with
their identifying metadata removed regardless of which switches are on.
WHAT IT DOESN'T DO
Privacy Buddy removes EXIF, TIFF, GPS, IPTC, PNG text and camera maker-note metadata. It
does not alter the image itself — faces, screens, street signs and anything else visible in
the frame stay exactly as they are. It's a metadata tool, not a redaction tool.
Free, with no in-app purchases and no subscription - just as you need Privacy.
