This App Automatically Hides Faces and Obscures Metadata From Photos

Between facial recognition technology and your phone's habit of embedding metadata (including geolocation data) in every picture you take, sharing photos can feel like forfeiting any chance at privacy.

Sometimes you want to share a photo with the public web but don't want to share the location in which it was taken, or any faces—if there's a child in the photo, say, or if you didn't get a chance to ask everyone permission to post the image online. Discretion is an indie app for Mac and iOS from developer David Kennedy that automatically hides faces and strips photos of all identifying metadata.

Hide faces in a single step

Using the app is simple. Just open it and add any photo—you'll see that all faces are covered up immediately.

By default, faces are covered with a grey circle. You can change the default filter to a different color or, for the paid version, an emoji in the settings; alternatively, you can change each person to a different color and/or emoji. You can also change the size of the circles if you need to, though in my testing the app did a good job of covering up all the identifiable features.

Strip away metadata

Discretion's other big feature is metadata removal. Photos taken by modern phones embed all kinds of info right in the file—the camera you used, for one thing, but also the exact GPS coordinate where the photo was taken. Discretion strips all of this stuff out.

Here's a before and after comparison of a photo I ran through the app:

As you can see, all kinds of details have been removed, from the device used to take the photo, to the camera settings, to the latitude and longitude. This kind of metadata stripping is worth considering even if you're not interested in the face obscuring feature (which you can turn off in the settings).

Discretion's free version works well. The paid version adds batch processing and emoji filters for faces; it costs $1.99 per year or $4.99 for a lifetime subscription.