Between facial recognition technology and your phone’s habit of embedding metadata (including geolocation data) into every photo you take, sharing photos can feel like losing any chance of privacy.

Sometimes you want to share a photo with the public web, but you don’t want to share where it was taken, or any faces (if there’s a child in the photo, for example, or if you don’t have not had the opportunity to do so). ask everyone for permission to post the image online. Discretion is a standalone app for Mac and iOS from developer David Kennedy that automatically hides faces and strips photos of all identifying metadata.

Hide faces in one step

Using the app is simple. Just open it and add any photo: you will see that all faces are immediately hidden.

Credit: Justin Pot

By default, faces are covered with a gray 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, although in my testing the app did a good job of hiding all identifiable features.

Credit: Justin Pot

The other great feature of Discretion is metadata removal. Photos taken by modern phones embed all sorts of information directly into the file: the camera you used, on the one hand, but also the exact GPS coordinates of where the photo was taken. Discretion removes all that.

Here’s a before and after comparison of a photo I browsed through the app:

Credit: Justin Pot

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

The free version of Discretion 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.