About FileScrub

Most people don't know that every photo they take contains their GPS coordinates, their device model, and a timestamped record of their whereabouts. Every document they share may expose their name, their company, and the history of every edit ever made to that file.

This information travels silently alongside files, invisible to the untrained eye, and can be extracted by anyone with the right tool — which today means anyone on the internet.

FileScrub exists to close that gap. We provide free, easy-to-use tools that anyone — regardless of technical knowledge — can use to understand and control what data their files expose. No account, no upload, no fee. Just drag, scrub, and download.

Client-Side Architecture

When you drop a file into FileScrub, it's loaded into your browser's memory using the FileReader API — exactly the same way a text editor loads a local file. The file never makes an HTTP request to any server.

For images, we use exifr, a pure JavaScript library, to parse EXIF data. To strip metadata, we draw the image to an HTML5 Canvas and export it as a new blob — a fresh image file that has no attached metadata because it was created programmatically.

For Office documents (DOCX, XLSX, PPTX), these are actually ZIP archives. We use JSZip to unpack them in memory, find the metadata XML files inside, clear the relevant fields, and repack them — all in the browser.

For PDFs, we parse the file as a byte array and locate XMP metadata blocks and Info dictionary entries using pattern matching, nulling them out before offering the modified file for download.