DotScramble: blur, pixelate or black-bar faces, plates and text, and strip the EXIF/GPS hidden in the file, before you share a photo. Local, open source, Linux.
Open a photo. Pick what to hide. Compare. Save.
That is DotScramble, a photo privacy studio for Linux. It blurs, pixelates or black-bars faces, eyes, license plates and text, and on save it strips or replaces the EXIF and GPS data hidden in the file. Everything runs on your machine. It's open source (Apache 2.0) and part of DotSuite, my collection of developer tools.
Why?
A photo you're about to post usually shows more than you meant to:
- the faces of people who never agreed to be online,
- a car's number plate, a name on a badge, an address on a parcel,
- and, invisible in the picture itself, the exact GPS location, the phone model and the time it was taken.
The usual options on Linux are a full image editor (select every face by hand, then remember the metadata is still there) or an online "blur faces" site, which means uploading the very photo you're trying to protect. I wanted one small app that does the whole job locally, shows you exactly what it's about to hide, and is honest when it can't.
What it hides, and how
What: faces, eyes, full bodies, license plates, any text it can read (OCR), one specific word (a name, a phone number), regions you draw by hand, or the whole image.
How: seven effects (blur, pixelation, black bar, gradient, mosaic, frosted glass, oil paint) with strength, block size and opacity controls.
Two things make it feel safe to use:
- Detect preview. Before anything changes, every region it found is outlined. Click one to skip it, so with several people in a photo you protect exactly the ones you choose. The status bar says "3 of 4 regions will be hidden".
- Compare. A before / after split view with a draggable divider (that's the GIF at the top).
It also refuses to pretend. If detection can't run (say, OpenCV's cascade files are missing), you get an error, never a "done" with the face still visible.
The metadata you can't see
Every photo from a phone carries EXIF data: GPS coordinates, camera make and model, timestamps, sometimes a device fingerprint. DotScramble handles it on save:
- Keep it,
- Strip GPS, camera and device tags,
- or replace them with believable decoys (three presets, or set each field yourself).
Before the file is written, a report lists every field that will be kept, removed or replaced, so there are no surprises.
AI Evasion
A blurred face is unreadable to people, but face detectors can often still find it, and a face software can find can be indexed and matched. AI Evasion adds a small, optimised pattern of noise to the face region (a black-box SPSA optimisation against the detector) until the detector no longer finds a face there.
- Hybrid blurs the face for people and hides it from the detector.
- Invisible leaves the face looking the same, and only fools the detector.
- It takes about 30–90 seconds per face on the CPU, and it reports the result honestly: complete, partial (with the evasion rate) or failed.
To be clear about the limits: the pattern is tuned against the detector DotScramble itself uses (MediaPipe). It is not a guarantee against every face recognition system, so treat it as an extra layer on top of a visible effect, not a replacement.
Also in the box
- Batch processing for whole folders, with a per-file error report.
- Zoom and pan, live preview, presets, undo and redo.
- 7 languages: English, العربية, فارسی, Español, Русский, Deutsch and Türkçe, with right-to-left layouts and correct plural forms in every one of them.
- 16 themes; every dialog follows the one you pick.
- Signed updates: the built-in updater checks the checksum and the GPG signature before installing anything.
Free and Pro
Everything you need to hide faces is free: all seven effects, Detect preview, Compare, zoom, face and eye detection (OpenCV Haar cascades), manual regions and batches of three images.
The optional Pro plan (DotScramble Max on dotsuite.dev) adds AI face ovals and eye bars (MediaPipe), full bodies, license plates, text and single-word detection, AI Evasion, the metadata tools and unlimited batches.
Install
Grab one of these from the releases page:
# AppImage: any distribution, no install
chmod +x DotScramble-Linux-x86_64.AppImage && ./DotScramble-Linux-x86_64.AppImage
# Debian, Ubuntu, Kali, Mint
sudo apt install ./DotScramble-Linux-x86_64.deb
# Arch, Manjaro
sudo pacman -U DotScramble-Linux-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst
# optional, for the text and word modes
sudo apt install tesseract-ocr
There's also a portable .tar.gz, and it runs from source with Python 3.10+. Every release ships SHA256SUMS and a detached GPG signature for each package, so you can check what you downloaded:
sha256sum -c SHA256SUMS --ignore-missing
gpg --import DotScramble-signing-key.asc
gpg --verify DotScramble-Linux-x86_64.AppImage.asc DotScramble-Linux-x86_64.AppImage
DotScramble is also on AppImageHub and OpenDesktop. The AppImage carries update information, so AppImageUpdate and Gear Lever can update it too.
What goes online
Your photos never leave your computer. The app only connects to GitHub (to check for updates and the supported-version policy), to dotsuite.dev (to activate or re-check Pro), and, the first time you use a Pro AI feature and only if you agree, to Google's storage to download the MediaPipe face model (about 8 MB).
Honest limitations
- Linux x86_64 only, and the packages need glibc 2.35+ (Ubuntu 22.04, Debian 12, Fedora 36 and newer). Older systems can run it from source. No Windows or macOS builds yet.
- The text and word modes need Tesseract installed.
- AI Evasion is slow (30–90 s per face on the CPU) and is tested against one detector, not all of them.
- Save AI-evaded images as PNG: JPEG compression can weaken the pattern.
Try it
If you try it, I'd love to know what you hide most, and what's missing.
- GitHub: kareem2099/DotScramble
- Project page: dotsuite.dev/en/product/dotscramble
- Also on: AppImageHub · OpenDesktop
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