Sepia

Share images without oversharing.

Photos and screenshots say more than you think: where you were, what phone you own, sometimes a hidden copy of the uncropped shot. Sepia shows you all of it, blacks out what you choose, and hands back a file it has re-checked itself.

Choose an image or drop one here, or paste with Ctrl+V

Everything happens on this device. Nothing is uploaded, ever.

What leaks when you share a picture

Where you were

Phone cameras write GPS coordinates into every shot. Forwarding a photo of your dog can hand over your home address to whoever downloads it.

Who and what took it

Camera serial numbers, owner name fields, editing software, timestamps down to the second and time zone. Enough to tie separate photos to one person.

A hidden second image

Many files carry a small preview copy inside. Crop something embarrassing out, and the preview can still show the full original.

A hidden video

Motion photo modes append a short video clip after the image data. It travels with the file, invisible in every normal viewer.

Bad redactions

Highlighter smears and crops done in the wrong app leave the covered text recoverable. Sepia burns redactions into the pixels and re-encodes everything.

Codes you forgot about

Boarding passes, tickets, parcel labels. The QR code in your screenshot holds more than the text next to it. On devices that support code detection, Sepia finds them and offers to cover them.

It shows its work

Every scrubber promises a clean file. Sepia re-opens the finished file and runs the same X-ray on it that it ran on the original, then shows you the result. If anything survived, you would see it listed, not a green checkmark on faith.

What Sepia does not do

  • It cannot read minds about pixels. A face, a street sign, or a reflection in a window is content, and covering it is your call. Sepia gives you the tools and flags QR codes, nothing more.
  • Pixelation on text is weaker than ink. Research keeps un-blurring blurred text. For words and numbers, use the ink tool; pixelate is for faces and objects.
  • No PDFs. Half-done PDF redaction has burned people badly, and pretending to handle it would be worse than not handling it.
  • A camera's sensor leaves a faint fingerprint in the pixels themselves. Removing metadata does not remove that. If your threat is a forensics lab, you need more than any scrubber.

The Android app cannot phone home

The Sepia app ships without the internet permission. Not "we promise not to upload", the operating system will not let it open a connection at all. Check the manifest yourself.

Download the APK

Or use the web app right here. Once it's served over https, it works offline and can be installed: from the browser menu on Chrome and Edge, or through Share, then "Add to Home Screen" on Safari.

Questions people ask

Is my image uploaded to a server?

No. There is no server to upload to. The page never opens a connection except to fetch its own code from this site, and the Android app cannot open connections at all.

Why not just screenshot the photo?

A screenshot does drop the original metadata, but it also drops resolution, keeps whatever was visible, and your screenshot tool may write its own timestamps and file names that say when and where you took it. Sepia keeps the full resolution, lets you pick the quality trade-off, covers what you choose, and gives the file a name that says nothing.

What happens to the hidden video in motion photos?

Re-encoding keeps only the pixels you see, so the appended clip is gone from the output. The X-ray warns you it was there, so you know what the original still carries.

Can I keep my copyright line in the file?

Not yet. The first version strips everything; a keep-my-credit option is on the list.

Is this open source?

Yes, GPL licensed. The whole app is readable JavaScript with no dependencies.