Metadata Delete

Remove metadata and the author from a PDF

Photos carry GPS coordinates and camera serial numbers. Documents carry author names, company names, comments and edit history. This tool finds it and removes it.

Your files never leave your device. Everything happens inside this browser tab. There is no server to upload to. Once the page has loaded you can switch off your Wi-Fi and it still works. The cleaned copy is a brand-new file, so it also leaves behind what your computer stores alongside the original, like where it was downloaded from.

    Supported formats

    Photos and images
    JPEG, PNG, WebP, HEIC, AVIF, JPEG XL, JPEG 2000, GIF, SVG, BMP, ICO, TGA, PCX, TIFF, DNG, OpenEXR, Photoshop (PSD/PSB), GIMP (.xcf), Krita (.kra), OpenRaster (.ora), Procreate, Sketch; camera RAW (CR2, CR3, NEF, ARW, RAF, ORF, RW2, PEF and other TIFF-based RAW)
    Documents
    PDF; Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Visio (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx, .vsdx and the older .doc, .xls, .ppt); OpenDocument; Pages, Numbers, Keynote; RTF; e-books (EPUB, Kindle MOBI/AZW3, FictionBook .fb2); DjVu; InDesign IDML; Illustrator (.ai, cleaned as PDF); XPS and OpenXPS; comic books (.cbz); Markdown (front matter); plain text and CSV
    Email
    .eml (attachments cleaned too) and Outlook .msg
    Video
    MP4, MOV, M4V, 3GP, WebM, MKV, AVI, WMV, FLV, camcorder MTS/M2TS, Ogg video
    Audio
    MP3, M4A, M4B audiobooks, AAC, FLAC, WAV (including over 4 GB), AIFF, WMA, WavPack, Monkey's Audio, Ogg Vorbis, Opus, Speex, FLAC in Ogg, DSD (.dsf, .dff), MIDI
    Archives
    ZIP, TAR, .tar.gz/.tgz and .gz, including every supported file inside them
    Web and other
    HTML pages; GPS route files (GPX, KML, KMZ); 3D, CAD and 3D printing (glTF/GLB, OBJ/MTL, STL, 3MF, USDZ/USD, DXF, Blender .blend); fonts (TTF, OTF, WOFF, WOFF2); torrents

    Drop your PDF above and it is cleaned on your own device. Nothing is uploaded.

    A PDF records who made it. The document properties hold the title, author, subject and keywords, the app it was made with ("Created with" and "Produced by") and the dates it was created and last modified. All of these are removed.

    So is the less obvious material: XMP metadata, the document ID, private data left by apps such as Illustrator and Photoshop, and the names and dates attached to comments and annotations. Photos embedded in the PDF are cleaned too, so EXIF inside those JPEG images goes as well.

    The whole file is rewritten. That matters because some editors add each save to the end of the file, so an old author name or date can survive inside a PDF even after you change the properties. Rewriting discards those earlier saved versions.

    What stays: the text and images you can see, and the text of any comments. Only who wrote a comment and when is removed.

    Password-protected or encrypted PDFs cannot be cleaned. Remove the protection first, then drop the file again.

    Questions

    Will this remove text hidden under a black box?

    No. This is not a redaction tool. If text was covered with a black box rather than properly redacted, it is still in the file.

    Why not just delete the author in my PDF app's properties?

    Some editors keep earlier saved versions inside the file, so the old author can still be found. Cleaning here rewrites the whole PDF.

    Remove metadata from…

    What this can't do