Download the APK on the phone (or use the command above with the phone plugged in) and confirm Android's prompt.
PHOTO PRIVACY · ANDROID 11+ · OPEN SOURCE
Your photos talk.
Make them stop.
Every photo you send can carry where you stood, which phone you own, your name and the second you pressed the shutter. Cybermeta shows you exactly what's inside, then strips it out without touching a single pixel.
NO INTERNET PERMISSIONVERIFIED CLEANLOSSLESSMIT LICENSED
SCAN ACTIVE9 LEAKS
01 / WHAT A PHOTO GIVES AWAY
It's not just GPS.
It's everything around the picture.
"Remove location" switches only touch one corner of the file. These are the places Cybermeta looks. Tap any card for the details.
02 / LIVE LAB
Drop a photo.
Watch it get scrubbed.
This runs entirely in your browser: the photo never leaves your device. It's a small JavaScript version of the scan; the app runs the full Rust engine and double-checks its own work.
03 / THE APP
Share in. Clean. Share out.
Cybermeta sits in your share sheet. Send photos to it from Gallery or Photos, see the report, and send clean copies on: to a chat, an email, a marketplace listing.
01
Pick, share, or 1-tap tile
Up to 100 at once from the photo picker, your files, or the Quick Settings pull-down tile to clean your latest camera shot.
02
See what they give away
Grouped findings, ghost thumbnail cropping leak detection, and offline reverse-geocoding without network access.
03
Clean and send
Five modes: Share-safe, Location only, Anonymous camera, Pixels only, Shift dates. Then share, save, or replace the originals.
CYBERMETA
See what your photos give away.
Then make it disappear.
Then make it disappear.
▣ PICK PHOTOS
▤ BROWSE FILES
No internet permissionYour photos can't leave the phone through it.
Verified cleanRe-read by a second parser before you get it.
No quality lossThe picture is copied byte for byte.
3 photos27 things they give away HIGH RISK
📍 5 where you were👤 3 who you are🎞 1 hidden data📷 6 your camera🕒 6 when
CLEAN MODE
Share-safeLocation onlyPixels only
✔ CLEAN 3 PHOTOS
✔
CLEAN
27 findings removed from 3 photos · 41.2 KB of metadata
⇪ SHARE CLEAN COPIES
SAVE · REPLACE ORIGINALS
04 / WHY NOT JUST "REMOVE LOCATION"?
Built-in switches miss most of it.
Share sheets with a "remove location" option clear the EXIF GPS tags. That's one item on a long list.
| WHAT'S IN THE PHOTO | "REMOVE LOCATION" SWITCH | CYBERMETA |
|---|---|---|
| EXIF GPS position | removed | removed |
| GPS copied into XMP by editors | often kept | removed |
| City / country written by apps (IPTC, XMP) | kept | removed |
| Camera body & lens serial numbers | kept | removed |
| Owner / artist / creator name | kept | removed |
| Embedded thumbnail (the photo before you cropped it) | kept | removed |
| Motion-photo video hidden after the image | kept | removed |
| Capture time to the second | kept | removed or shifted |
| File name like IMG_20261019_143022 | kept | randomised |
| Checks its own output | no | every photo |
05 / HOW YOU KNOW IT WORKED
Scrubbed, then checked by someone else.
The engine is the same Rust code as the cybermeta command-line tool, compiled into the app.
1
Split
The file is cut into its blocks: picture data, EXIF, XMP, IPTC, colour profile, comments, thumbnails, trailers.
2
Rebuild
A new file is assembled from the picture data alone, copied byte for byte. Nothing is decoded or re-encoded.
3
Keep only what you chose
Rotation and colour profile go back in as brand-new blocks holding only those values.
4
Verify
A second, independent parser reads the result. If anything else is still there, you get an error, never a leaky photo.
0network permissions. Your photos can't leave through it.
0of the picture data copied, untouched.
0kinds of leak detected, from GPS to hidden video.
0CYBERGRID themes built in. Pick one in Settings.
KNOWN LIMITATIONS
Know what the cleaner can do.
Cybermeta can audit more formats than it can safely rebuild. The app reports when a format or file needs special handling.
HEIC, AVIF, TIFF and JPEG XL
These formats can be audited, but the engine cannot scrub them losslessly yet. Turn on conversion to create a JPEG when Android can decode the source; conversion re-encodes the image and may not be available for every file.
Editing tags in some WebP files
Scrubbing WebP metadata is supported. Editing tags, including Anonymous Camera, can fail on some WebP files depending on their header structure; this does not affect scrubbing.
Motion photos in Location only mode
The embedded video track may contain its own GPS data. Location only keeps that track, so use a full scrub to remove the video and its metadata.
06 / INSTALL
Signed APK. One command.
Cybermeta isn't on the Play Store. Releases are signed with the project's own key, and the installer checks both the checksum and the signing certificate.
⬇ On your phone
Open this page on your Android phone, download the APK and tap it. Android asks once to allow installs from your browser.
DOWNLOAD CYBERMETA.APKRelease notes ↗ · Android 11 or newer · arm64 / x86_64
Signing certificate SHA-256
88:39:05:95:F5:FB:F1:71:DC:03:D0:40:AB:C8:ED:C2:A7:FB:9E:97:33:20:B3:C4:BB:E7:25:D4:13:9B:28:3C
88:39:05:95:F5:FB:F1:71:DC:03:D0:40:AB:C8:ED:C2:A7:FB:9E:97:33:20:B3:C4:BB:E7:25:D4:13:9B:28:3C
⌘ From a terminal
Works on Linux, macOS and Termux. With a phone on adb it installs there; on Termux it opens Android's installer; otherwise it leaves the verified APK in the current folder.
On first launch, tap Allow so Cybermeta can see the GPS it's about to remove. It's only for the report.
Get automatic updates from the Cybercore F-Droid repository (same signed APK), or add github.com/cybercoretech/cybermeta-android-app to Obtainium.
07 / QUESTIONS
Fine print, in plain words.
Does Cybermeta upload my photos anywhere?
It can't. The app doesn't hold Android's INTERNET permission (it's explicitly removed in the manifest), so the system won't let it open a network connection. Photos are read, cleaned and handed back to the share sheet entirely on your phone.
Does cleaning reduce quality?
For JPEG, PNG and WebP, the compressed picture data is copied byte for byte into the new file. HEIC and AVIF require conversion to JPEG when conversion is enabled, which re-encodes the image. TIFF and JPEG XL cannot currently be scrubbed by the app.
Why does it ask for "media location" access?
Android hides GPS from apps by default and hands them a copy with the coordinates zeroed. Without the permission the report would say "no location" for a photo that has one. The cleaned copy is safe either way; the permission only makes the report honest.
What do the clean modes do?
Share-safe removes everything but keeps the colour profile and rotation. Location only removes GPS and named places and keeps the rest. Anonymous camera removes everything, then labels the photo "Generic Camera". Pixels only keeps nothing at all. Shift dates moves every timestamp by an offset you choose.
My Samsung shoots motion photos. What happens to them?
A motion photo is a JPEG with a short video glued on after the end of the image. A full scrub removes that video and keeps the still photo. Location only keeps the video, which may carry its own GPS data, so use a full scrub when you need that removed.
Can I overwrite my originals?
Yes, but only through Android's own "allow Cybermeta to modify these photos" prompt, for the exact photos you picked. By default Cybermeta never touches originals: it shares or saves clean copies to Pictures/Cybermeta.
What is a ghost thumbnail or cropping leak?
When you crop a photo in a gallery or editing app to remove a face, address, or sensitive detail, the app often saves the cropped image but leaves the full-frame original thumbnail inside EXIF IFD1. Anyone who extracts that thumbnail can see what you cropped out. Cybermeta audits embedded thumbnails, detects aspect ratio mismatches, displays a side-by-side comparison, and scrubs the thumbnail completely.
How does Cybermeta show city and country without internet?
Cybermeta bundles an ultra-compact offline database of ~34,000 world cities (GeoNames cities15000) directly inside the app. When coordinates are detected, an on-device nearest-neighbor search resolves the locality in under 2 milliseconds without sending a single byte across the network.
How does the Quick Settings tile work?
You can add the "Clean Latest" tile to your Android notification shade. Tapping it queries the most recent camera capture from your local MediaStore, opens Cybermeta, audits and scrubs it, and lets you immediately share or save the clean copy in seconds.
Is there a desktop version?
Yes: cybermeta is a TUI and CLI for Linux and macOS with the same engine, batch folders and a privacy audit. curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cybercoretech/cybermeta/main/install.sh | sh