Remove metadata
Strip the hidden details a PDF carries about who made it.
This tool runs entirely in your browser. Your file is never uploaded, and you can verify that in your browser's network tab. Verify it yourself: open your browser's network tab and watch. You will see one small request asking whether you have tasks left - a tool name and a hash, never the file.
What this does
This clears the information a PDF carries about itself rather than anything on its pages. That is more than the author field people expect: the document properties, the XMP packet, the private data an editor left under /PieceInfo, per-page metadata, and the identifier in the trailer. The file is read first, so the result can tell you what was actually found and what was removed.
Use it before a document leaves your organisation: a tender response that should not name the person who drafted it, a CV that would otherwise carry your employer's file server path, or a template you are publishing that still credits the client you built it for.
How it works
- Drop the PDF onto this page.
- Leave Keep the title off unless the title is deliberate and public - it is often a file path or a working name nobody meant to publish.
- Leave Keep the dates off if you are anonymising. The timestamps are a fingerprint, and clearing them clears the document identifier with them.
- Press Remove metadata.
- Read the report. It lists what was found in the file and what was taken out, so nothing to remove is a real and useful answer.
The gap between what people expect this to remove and what a PDF actually carries is the reason the tool exists. A file routinely records the application that produced it, the operating system account signed in at the time, the full path the source document lived at, every editing session's timestamps, and - in anything that passed through Illustrator or InDesign - a private data blob under /PieceInfo that no PDF reader will ever display to you.
The trailer identifier matters more than its obscurity suggests. It is a pair of hashes derived from the file and the moment it was written, and it survives every cleanup tool that only clears the document properties dialog. Two files carrying the same first identifier are demonstrably versions of one original, which is precisely what someone anonymising a document does not want to leave behind.
Removal here means removal, not blanking. Each entry is deleted from the file and anything only that entry pointed at goes with it, so the values are not left sitting in the bytes for anyone who opens the file in a text editor. When the properties dictionary ends up empty it is dropped entirely, because an empty one is itself a small signal about how the file was made.
This does not touch what is written on the pages. A name in a letterhead, a signature block, a footer with a file path - all of that is content, and content is what Redact PDF is for. Metadata removal makes the file anonymous; it does not make the document anonymous.
The reading and the rewriting both happen in your browser with pdf-lib. There is a pleasing consistency in that: a tool whose job is to stop a document telling strangers about you would be a strange thing to run by sending the document to a stranger.
What this tool cannot do
- Only the file's own metadata is removed. Names, addresses and paths written into the page content stay exactly where they are - use Redact PDF for those.
- Metadata stored inside embedded images, such as a photograph's EXIF block with its camera and GPS fields, is not read or stripped.
Questions people ask
- What exactly gets removed?
- The document information dictionary - title, author, subject, keywords, creator, producer and timestamps - plus the XMP metadata packet, the /PieceInfo blobs editors leave at document and page level, per-page metadata streams, and the identifier in the trailer. The result lists which of these were actually present in your file.
- How do I verify it worked?
- Open the result in any reader and look at document properties: the fields are empty. For a stricter check, run exiftool on the file, or open it in a text editor and search for the author's name - the entries are deleted rather than blanked, so there is nothing left to find.
- Does this remove my name from the text of the document?
- No, and the distinction matters. This clears what the file says about itself. A name printed in a letterhead, typed in a signature block or sitting in a footer is page content, and removing it means redacting the page - Redact PDF removes the pixels and the underlying text together.
- Why are the dates and the document identifier cleared together?
- Because they are the same kind of evidence. The creation and modification times say when the file was written; the trailer identifier is derived from the file and that same moment, and it links copies of one document to each other. Keeping the dates keeps the file's identity, so the two move together rather than giving you a false sense of a clean file.
- Where does the file go?
- Nowhere. It is read and rewritten by pdf-lib in a Web Worker on your device, and none of what you are stripping out goes anywhere. For a tool used specifically to keep a document from revealing things about you, that is the only sensible design - and you can confirm it in the network tab, where the one request carries a tool name and a hash.