Remove PDF Metadata
Clear the hidden fields that travel with a PDF — author, title, subject, keywords, the software that made it, and the creation and modification dates — plus the XMP packet that duplicates them. The tool lists exactly what it found before wiping it.
Drop PDF files here or click to select
One or many · a cleaned copy per file
No PDF handy? Try one from the sample library.
What gets removed
- Document information dictionary — Title, Author, Subject, Keywords, Creator and Producer. Author is the field that most often leaks a real name, and Creator the one that names the internal template or tool.
- XMP metadata — the XML packet modern producers embed, which duplicates the same fields and often adds document IDs, edit history and application details. It is removed wholesale.
- Dates — creation and modification timestamps, which reveal when a document was drafted regardless of what it says.
What it cannot remove
Metadata is not the only thing hiding in a PDF. Text under a black rectangle is still text, deleted content can survive in an incremental update, and a form field can retain a value that is not displayed. For those, use Redact PDF to remove content properly and Flatten PDF to bake form fields and annotations into the page.
Embedded files and image EXIF are also out of scope here. If a page is a photo, the photo's own metadata is inside the image stream — rasterising via grayscale or compress drops it as a side effect, at the cost of the text layer.
Before sharing a document
- Strip metadata (this tool) so no name, template or timestamp travels with it.
- Check for hidden content — inspect the structure and extract the text to see what is really in there.
- Flatten forms and annotations so comments and field values cannot be read back.
- Redact rather than cover anything genuinely sensitive; a black box is decoration, not removal.
FAQ
Is the metadata really gone, or just blanked?
The Info dictionary fields are set to empty strings and the XMP packet is removed from the catalogue, then the file is rewritten without object streams — so the old values are not carried into the new file. What a determined forensic tool could recover from a partially-updated original is exactly why the output is a fresh document rather than an incremental save.
Why reset dates to the epoch rather than removing them?
Some viewers and validators expect the fields to exist. Setting them to 1970-01-01 keeps the file well-formed while carrying no information; choose Leave as they are if the dates matter to you.
Does it remove the digital signature?
Rewriting the document invalidates any existing signature — unavoidable, since a signature covers the bytes that just changed. Sign after cleaning, not before.
What about image EXIF inside the PDF?
Not touched. That data lives inside the embedded image streams. Rasterising the pages (via compress in rasterise mode) drops it, at the cost of the text layer.
Is the file uploaded?
No — which is rather the point. The scrub happens in your browser.
Related tools
- PDF metadata viewer/editor — read or set the fields instead of clearing them
- Redact PDF — remove visible content properly
- Flatten PDF — bake in forms and annotations
- PDF inspector — see what else is in the file
- Lock / unlock PDF — add or remove a password