PhotoSanitize Pro and Enterprise allow you to change individual sanitization settings through the Options tab. This is useful when a predefined profile is close to what you need but does not provide the exact combination of cleanup, output, or verification behavior required for your images.
Changing an individual option can switch the active profile to Custom. Before processing a batch, review the displayed settings so that you know which operations will be applied.
Metadata and container cleanup
The metadata and container controls determine how PhotoSanitize handles information stored alongside the picture. Remove embedded thumbnails and previews addresses supplementary image representations, while Remove unknown / non-allowlisted container data targets supported structures that are not required in the cleaned output.
Remove Motion Photo video/audio and auxiliary media controls the treatment of supported additional media. This can be particularly relevant to modern smartphone photographs, where a still image may be accompanied by video or other content.
Unexpected trailing data is subject to enforced cleanup and cannot be disabled through the normal interface. The metadata policy likewise removes nonessential metadata rather than providing unrestricted manual editing of individual EXIF, XMP, or IPTC fields.
These options are intended for selecting an appropriate cleanup policy, not for using PhotoSanitize as a general-purpose metadata editor.
Image reconstruction
Rebuild image from decoded pixels using a clean container changes how the resulting image is produced. Instead of retaining the original container where possible, PhotoSanitize reconstructs the picture into a new output.
Use lossless JPEG sanitization when possible favors supported operations that avoid unnecessary JPEG recompression. This is valuable when you want metadata cleanup without another lossy encoding stage.
Normalize orientation into the pixel data helps account for images whose correct displayed orientation depends on metadata. Once orientation information is removed, the resulting picture still needs to appear correctly.
Other controls address color information in fully transparent pixels, flattening of transparency, and treatment of color profiles.
These settings can affect appearance or compatibility, so use them deliberately when preparing illustrations, screenshots, logos, professional photography, or images with unusual properties.
Color and frames
The Color control allows you to normalize suitable images to sRGB, preserve the source color profile, or remove profile information. These choices influence how the resulting image may appear in color-managed applications.
The Frames control determines whether supported multiple frames or pages should be preserved or whether the output should be limited to the first frame.
This is important for animated GIF, WebP, and PNG files, as well as multipage TIFF documents. Flattening an image to the first frame can intentionally create a still picture, but it also removes later frames from the result.
Visual Privacy
Custom settings let you enable individual automatic detectors for faces, license plates, visible text, QR codes, and barcodes. You can also configure whether human review of visual findings is required.
When review is required, PhotoSanitize expects the applicable detections to be examined and confirmed before sanitization. Without required review, enabled detectors may be applied during processing according to the chosen configuration.
Automatic detection is not a substitute for visual judgment. In particular, it may select content that should remain visible or miss content that requires concealment.
Maximum Privacy uses its full detector configuration and mandatory review rather than allowing those requirements to be bypassed.
Output settings
The Output controls determine where sanitized files are written and which image format is requested. Pro and Enterprise can use a custom destination folder, change the default filename suffix, and choose an output format such as JPEG, PNG, WebP, TIFF, BMP, or GIF.
A quality value is available for applicable JPEG and WebP encoding. You can also preserve relative source folders when processing a directory tree into a custom output location.
An explicit output format must still be compatible with the source image and the selected operations. An incompatible combination may be rejected rather than silently producing an unsuitable file.
File-system and verification settings
Normalize output file timestamps can be enabled when source-related file timestamps should not be retained in the resulting file.
The verification controls include post-sanitization verification and checks associated with NTFS alternate data streams. SHA-256 fingerprinting remains part of the application’s processing requirements, while independent reinspection forms part of enabled verification.
The normal Content Credentials policy removes embedded C2PA information from sanitized outputs. Provenance validation information can also be included in reports when the relevant reporting option is enabled.
Working with custom configurations
Custom is most useful when you understand why particular settings are needed. For a one-time personal photograph, a predefined profile will often be simpler.
Professional users may need to preserve a source color profile, retain animation frames, select a specific output format, or direct sanitized files into a controlled publication folder. An organization may also require a consistent set of options across a recurring workflow.
PhotoSanitize retains supported user preferences, but you should still inspect them before starting a new collection. Use Reset Defaults when you want to return to the Standard profile and its predefined configuration.