Remove metadata from screenshots before support tickets
Filing a bug report usually means attaching a screenshot. It's the fastest way to show a support desk or a vendor exactly what broke. But that screenshot is a file like any other, and it can carry hidden metadata you never meant to send along with it.
What rides along in a support-ticket screenshot
If the screenshot came from a phone or was saved by an app that embeds EXIF, it can include a timestamp, device model, and — on some phones and apps — GPS coordinates from when or where the image was captured or saved. Screen-capture tools and some ticketing systems also tack on their own fields: software name, internal IDs, sometimes a username baked into an editor's metadata. None of that shows up in the picture itself, but it's sitting inside the file.
Support tickets often get routed through third-party vendors, outsourced help desks, or shared ticket queues outside your organization. A screenshot that leaves your machine carrying your device info or location is handing a stranger more than you intended — just to show them a broken button.
Why this is easy to miss
Most people trust a screenshot because it looks like "just a picture of my screen." The file format doesn't care — PNG and JPEG screenshots can carry the same metadata fields as a photo from a camera. Pasting the image into a ticketing form or email doesn't strip anything either; the original file, metadata intact, usually gets attached as-is.
If your bug report also includes a scanned log file, a PDF export, or an Office document attachment, know that scrub currently only detects hidden content in PDFs and Word/Office files — it flags what it finds but doesn't remove it yet. For those, redact or re-export manually before sending; scrub's cleaning today covers image files.
Clean the screenshot before you attach it
The fix takes seconds and doesn't involve uploading anything to a third-party site:
- Take or save the screenshotAs you normally would, locally on your device.
- Open it in scrubIt shows you exactly what metadata the file is carrying before you send it anywhere.
- Click Clean, then attachYou get a lossless copy with the hidden fields stripped — the screenshot looks identical, the extra data is gone.
Everything happens on your machine. The screenshot never gets uploaded to scrub or anywhere else just to be cleaned.
The short version
A bug-report screenshot can carry device, timestamp, and sometimes GPS metadata you didn't mean to send to a support desk. Strip it locally before you attach it — same habit as cleaning any photo before sharing it. Get scrub free and clean a screenshot in seconds.