Queue
Batch anything
Drop files or folders, run up to eight at once, pause, resume or abort. Each image can follow a preset or fork onto its own settings.
Unreference
Image privacy tool
Develop the photo.
Strip what it says about you.
Wash out your camera's fingerprint.
A full photo studio built around privacy. Grade and finish your pictures, take off the location, serials and provenance they carry, then reduce the sensor-level traces that tie them back to one physical camera. All of it on your own machine. Nothing is uploaded.
Windows
macOS
Linux
100% offline
Unreference
demo
IMG_4823.HEIC
Live
Look Clean · GPS present · Sensor off
Look94 + none
Tone · Color
Exposure
Contrast
Vibrance
Temperature
Plus curves, HSL, 3-way grading, masks, detail and effects.
Found in file10 found
Originals stay untouched.
Sensor racksexperimental
- Fingerprintoff
- Pixel Washeroff
- Patternoff
- Ghostsoff
- Opticsoff
- Driftoff
New random seed every export.
One window, three departments
A real photo editor, a metadata scrubber, and a sensor-level privacy lab, working on the same picture.
01
Develop
Grade it like you mean it.
Tone, curves, HSL, three-way grading, local masks, detail, effects and 94 looks. Crop, straighten, redact, watermark, resize, convert.
02
Strip
Take off what it says about you.
Location, time, camera and serials, MakerNotes, edit history, signed provenance, hidden previews, even the filename. Then write your own credit back.
03
Sensor
Loosen the link to your camera.
Pixel-level tools that work on the traces a sensor and lens leave in every frame, including removing your own camera's calibrated fingerprint.
Sensor department
Metadata is the easy part. The pixels remember the camera too.
Every sensor has its own pattern noise. Every lens bends light its own way. Every phone's processing leaves a grid. Unreference has five racks of pixel-level tools aimed at those traces, so an export is harder to match back to the device that took it.
Headline control
Fingerprint: remove your own camera's sensor signature.
Teach Unreference what your camera's sensor looks like, and it divides that calibrated gain map out of every export at native resolution, before anything else runs. It only acts when the stored map really matches the photo; otherwise it skips and tells you why.
Fingerprints are kept on your machine and can be deleted any time.
- Shoot flat frames. A blank wall or sky, out of focus, lowest ISO. 16 to 32 per set, RAW or JPEG.
- Calibrate. Frames are sorted by make, model, lens and size, and each set becomes one map, with hot sensels and quality readouts.
- Check any photo against your stored maps: match, no match, or too weak to tell.
- Export. Matching photos have the fingerprint divided out, at a strength you choose.
Pixel Washer pattern noise
Softens the high-frequency residue where sensor noise lives, evens out row and column gain, and lays down fresh grain that behaves like real photon noise.
Residual denoise · Edge keep · Row/column gain · Flat-field · Frequency notch · Resample · Grain · Shot shape · Force re-encode
Pattern demosaic
Makes the color-filter grid the camera's demosaic leaves behind less regular, and shifts which pixel reads as red, green or blue.
CFA amount · Remosaic period · Bayer phase · Green split · Zipper · Chroma period
Ghosts compression
Works on the JPEG block lattice: nudges real DCT coefficients, jitters blocks, recompresses off-grid, and re-rolls the lowest bits of every channel.
DCT scatter · Ghosting · Block jitter · Recompress · Low-bit scrub
Optics lens & color
Evens out the lens and sensor quirks a body is known by: color fringing, vignetting, dust and hot pixels, white-balance bias and per-channel response.
Chromatic · Vignette lift · Dust/hot pixel · Fringe · Neutral balance · Gamma jitter
Drift registration
Tiny geometric changes so the export no longer lines up pixel-for-pixel with the original or with the sensor's pattern.
Micro-scale · Micro-rotate · Translate · Warp · Elastic · Distortion
Random every time seed
Every export draws a fresh noise field and fresh drift values. They are never written into the file or the log, so two exports of one photo don't share a pattern either.
Arm · Mild / Strong · Residual energy readout
Sensor tools are experimental and their strengths are engineering estimates. They reduce the correlation between an export and its camera; they don't hide what the picture shows.
Develop department
The editing tools you'd expect from a pro photo app, in the same window that cleans the file.
Live preview at the photo's full resolution, Original next to Live, with a synced loupe up to 10×.
Tone
Exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, whites and blacks, a parametric curve, and point curves for luma, red, green and blue.
Color
Temperature, tint, saturation, vibrance, and HSL across eight hue bands.
Grading
Lift, gamma and gain wheels for shadows, midtones and highlights, plus quick color presets.
Detail
Texture, clarity, dehaze, sharpening with radius, detail and masking, luminance and color denoise.
Masks
Gradient and oval local adjustments with their own exposure, contrast, temperature, saturation, dehaze and sharpen.
Effects
Vignette, glow, Orton-style haze, film grain and fringe for finishing.
Geometry
Rotate, flip, straighten by dragging along the horizon, crop to an aspect or freehand, with thirds, golden and diagonal guides.
Redact
Blur, pixelate, solid or noise. The pixels underneath are destroyed, not covered, so there's nothing to recover.
Watermark
Text or your own logo (PNG, JPEG, WebP, SVG), nine anchors or tiled, with opacity and shadow.
94 looks11 families
NeutralFilmWeddingChromePastelStreetNightFadeB&WInstantCinema
AiryEditorialGold HourNeonMiamiLilacNight WalkTokyoNeon RainMoonlit70s FadeCross ProcessNoirSeleniumExpiredBleach BypassBlockbusterHorror Green
Strip department
Everything a photo carries about you, found and taken off.
The inspector shows what the open file actually holds. A file can report no EXIF at all and still carry a full-size hidden copy of the picture.
Remove
Location, capture time, camera and lens, the serial numbers that tie every frame to one body, the maker's private notes, edit history, Content Credentials, Apple Reference material, embedded previews, and data hidden past the end of the file.
GPSTimestampsCamera / lensSerialsMakerNotesXMPC2PAApple ReferencePreviewsTrailing bytes
Guard, then credit
Rename IMG_4823 to a sequence or an opaque token, neutralize the file dates on disk, and re-read the export to flag anything that came through. Then, if you want, write your own creator, copyright, caption, alt text, keywords and license onto the clean file.
FilenameFile timesVerify exportIdentityCaption & altLicense
Workflow
One photo or a whole folder.
Presets
One click, one recipe
Social, Archive and Maximum Privacy out of the box. Save your own, merge several into one, pin them to the right-click menu.
Formats
In and out
Opens JPEG, PNG, WebP, HEIC, DNG, TIFF and camera RAW. Exports JPEG, PNG, WebP, HEIC or a stripped DNG.
Proof
Verify and hash
Every export can be re-read and checked, with SHA-256 hashes before and after and an optional JSON report.
Originals
Never touched by accident
Exports go to a side folder or one you choose. Overwriting originals only happens if you pick Update originals.
Shell
Right-click it
Strip, compress, convert, resize, rotate and more from the File Explorer menu on Windows and the Files menu on Linux.
Built for anonymity
Tools to help you stay anonymous when you share a photo.
Who took it, where, when, and with which camera: Unreference gives you every lever we know of to take those answers out of a picture, and it runs entirely on your own computer to do it.
What you get
- Metadata, provenance and hidden copies removed in one pass.
- Sensor, lens and compression traces reduced at the pixel level.
- Your own camera's fingerprint divided out of every export.
- Filenames and file dates that no longer point back at you.
- All processing offline. No uploads, no account, no cloud.
- Originals left alone unless you say otherwise.
Straight talk
- These are privacy tools, not a lab certificate. No software can promise a photo can never be traced, and we won't pretend otherwise.
- The sensor racks reduce the link to your camera. How far depends on the photo and the strength you choose.
- A photo can still be recognised by what's in it: faces, places, the scene itself.
- A stripped file won't pass C2PA or Apple verification afterwards. That's the point of removing it.
Platforms
The same studio on Windows, macOS and Linux.
Windows
Full studio plus a File Explorer right-click menu and HEIC thumbnails in Explorer.
macOS
The full studio on your Mac.
Linux
Full studio plus a Files (Nautilus) right-click menu.
Presets and layout can sync through Steam Cloud. Photographs never do, and sync can be turned off per machine. Available in 31 languages.
