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u/logicalicy

r/macapps
ClipScrub - strips names and IDs out of screenshots, PDFs and documents on your Mac, before you paste them into ChatGPT or anywhere else ($29 paid once | r/macapps discount inside)
▲ 13 r/macapps

ClipScrub - strips names and IDs out of screenshots, PDFs and documents on your Mac, before you paste them into ChatGPT or anywhere else ($29 paid once | r/macapps discount inside)

Hi r/macapps!

ClipScrub finds and removes personal data from screenshots, PDFs, documents, spreadsheets and screen recordings on your Mac. Everything runs on your machine and nothing is uploaded. PCP below. Full list of what it does not do is in my first comment.

The problem

You copy-paste a screenshot of a customer record into ChatGPT to ask what an error means. The name, email or account number accidentally gets uploaded in full. The same could happen with a support ticket, a log, a row from a CSV. Once it's sent, the private data is uploaded to the cloud.

Mac Preview has a tool for this and it works. Preview can delete private details from the file in a way that's not recoverable. But it doesn't solve a couple of things:

  • The Markup rectangle, what people might accidentally use, is a drawing/shape and the text underneath is still selectable
  • The real tool takes out what you manually select but only in PDFs

This is fine for a 2-page PDF. But it becomes arduous for a 40-row CSV export, a long scrolling screenshot or a screen recording where a name is in a sidebar for four frames. The failure is human and not tooling. Many times in the past, I kept manually removing PII from screenshots and files like this.

ClipScrub scans PDFs, Word and RTF, PNG and JPG, JSON and CSV and XML, MP4 and MOV, and more all on-device (never leaves your Mac). In the Mac app, it lists every identifier it finds before stripping, so you can review it first. Your original file is never modified. ClipScrub has shortcuts to do it without opening the Mac app window. There's a shortcut to capture part of the screen and another that removes sensitive information from your clipboard.

Comparison

BlurData ($39/year, or $69 once with their discount as of Aug 2026) is the closest direct comparison. It reads JPG, PNG and PDF, OCRs 15 languages against ClipScrub's five, and runs on macOS 13 (earlier version than mine).

What it does better: it takes the text out of the PDF file instead of flattening the page. ClipScrub rasterises every page instead. If your PDFs need to stay searchable afterwards, then ClipScrub won't do that today.

BlurData supports JPG, PNG and PDF formats but ClipScrub also supports identifiers in CSVs, .docx files and screen recordings. A .docx through ClipScrub comes back as .docx with the same formatting. The Mac app and the CLI that comes with the app do DICOM and EDF headers as well.

ClipScrub's pseudonymise mode replaces identifiers with stable tokens instead of blanking out every value, so the same email is the same "token" throughout the file. You can still group, join and count these tokens (e.g. EMAIL_9F3A is an email token). Stripping data usually destroys it but ClipScrub does its best to keep the relationships in the data.

BlurData's $69 tier is two years of updates on one Mac. ClipScrub is every 1.x update permanently, on three Macs.

CleanShot X ($29 for one Mac, one year of updates, then $19/year optional) is not a direct comparison but it's what most Mac users already have. It's a better screenshot tool and has a lot of capabilities. Its blur and pixelate are manual, like Preview's. It will hide anything you select and it won't tell you that you missed the account number in row 99.

Pricing

$29, paid once. No subscription, no renewal, no activation server to connect to (all on-device). Three Macs. Every ClipScrub 1.x update included permanently.

14 day free trial, fully functional, no account and no card. 30 day refund.

https://clipscrub.com/#pricing

Direct download, no email needed: https://clipscrub.com/download/ClipScrub.dmg

For r/macapps: 25% off with code MACAPPLAUNCHES25. Capped at the first 50 uses. There's no end date, it just runs out when it does.

I'm also giving licences to the first five people who use it on real files and email me what it gets wrong (thanks in advance for your patience if I'm slow to respond). Comment (without private data please!) and I will DM you one. My list of known limits is below but let me know if you find issues and I will add them to the backlog to address.

I look forward to your feedback and continuing to make the app better.

Caveats

Full caveats list is in my first comment.

E.g. ClipScrub reads what is inside a file, not the file's metadata. It writes a new file, so the original's author and title fields never go into the output. Check the source with exiftool if detecting input metadata matters for what you are doing.

Disclaimer: ClipScrub is not a compliance service, does not guarantee complete de-identification, and is not legal advice. Detection is not exhaustive. Review every result before sharing.

u/logicalicy — 2 days ago