Metadata Remover for PDF and Photos

How to Remove Metadata From a File

1. 1

   Choose a file

   Drop one PDF or photo on the tool, choose it from your files or paste it.

2. 2

   Check the list

   Read what the file carries, such as author, dates, camera and GPS location.

3. 3

   Remove and download

   Press Remove metadata and save the clean copy, which has -clean added to its name.

What a Metadata Remover Does

A metadata remover deletes the hidden details a file carries about itself, such as an author name, the app that made it, dates, or the place a photo was taken. This tool first shows you what your file carries. Then it saves a clean copy and leaves your original as it is.

Photos keep their details in EXIF, the standard cameras and phones use to save the camera, its settings, the date and time, and the GPS position when location was on. A PDF keeps its details in a document information dictionary and often in an XMP packet. XMP is a standard created by Adobe that stores metadata as XML.

The tool reads your file in the browser. Drop a file, check the list, press Remove metadata. Before it hands over the clean copy, it reads the copy again. If anything is still there, you see an error instead of a file. You can also drop the clean file on the tool again. It then reports that nothing was found.

PDF Metadata Remover

The tool clears a PDF's document information, every XMP packet and its file identifier. The result stays a real PDF. Nothing is redrawn, so text stays selectable, images are not compressed again, and links and form fields stay. The result is a new file, so your original is not changed.

• Removed: the document information: title, author, subject, keywords, application, producer, both dates and any custom fields.
• Every XMP packet, the document's own and the ones attached to pages or images.
• The file identifier, an ID that can link a copy to its original.
• The EXIF, XMP, IPTC and comment blocks inside JPEG photos stored in the PDF. This is where a photo's camera and GPS details survive when photos are turned into a PDF.

• Stays: anything visible on the pages. A name typed in the text is content, not metadata.
• Comments and markup, including the author names and dates on them.
• What was typed into form fields, attached files, bookmarks and layers.
• Content hidden by cropping or covered by a shape. Cropping a PDF hides the edges, it does not delete them.
• Leftovers of earlier edits that the document no longer uses.

A digitally signed PDF no longer shows a valid signature afterward, as after any edit. A PDF/A file needs its XMP packet to count as PDF/A, so a cleaned file is a normal PDF, no longer a PDF/A.

Remove Metadata From Photo

To remove metadata from a photo, drop a JPG, PNG or WebP on the tool. It copies the picture data byte for byte and leaves out the hidden blocks, so there is no quality loss at all. A HEIC photo is the one exception. It comes back as a new JPG.

• JPG: removes the EXIF block (camera make and model, lens and exposure settings, date and time, GPS location, software, author, copyright and the small preview picture inside it), XMP, IPTC, Photoshop data, comments, other app-specific blocks, and any extra data after the end of the picture. Some phones store a motion photo clip, a depth map or an HDR gain map there. The gain map is the extra layer that makes an HDR photo brighter on an HDR screen. All of it is removed, so an HDR photo keeps its standard picture but is shown as a standard photo afterward.
• PNG: removes text notes (software name, author, comments and the generation settings some image generators save), XMP, the EXIF chunk, the time of the last change, private chunks added by apps, and anything after the end of the image.
• WebP: removes the EXIF and XMP chunks and unknown chunks.

Some things stay on purpose, so the picture looks the same. All three keep the color profile. A PNG also keeps transparency, gamma, pixel density (DPI) and animation frames. A WebP keeps transparency and animation. A PNG or WebP keeps its orientation value when it has one. A JPG that is stored sideways keeps one value that says which way is up, so it does not turn on its side. It is the only thing left of its EXIF block.

A browser cannot rewrite a HEIC file. So the tool decodes the photo and saves it as a new JPG at 92 percent quality. None of the HEIC's hidden details are carried over. The price is one round of re-compression. A photo larger than 16 megapixels is scaled down to 16 megapixels, and the colors of wide-color photos can shift slightly. To only look at a HEIC photo, use the HEIC viewer.

Remove Location From Photo

To remove location from a photo, use the tool on the JPG, PNG, WebP or HEIC file. When location was on, the photo's EXIF block stores the GPS position as latitude and longitude. The tool shows it in the list first. The clean copy does not carry it.

Metadata is not the whole story. The tool does not touch what you can see in the picture, such as a face, a street sign or a name on a document. To cover those, use Redact Image. It also does not change the file name or the dates your computer or phone shows for a file, because the device keeps those, not the file.

Removing metadata does not make a photo anonymous. The tool removes what this page lists, and nothing more.

What the Tool Can and Cannot Do

The tool takes one file at a time, up to 100 MB on a computer and 30 MB on a phone. A PDF can have up to 1,000 pages on a computer and 300 pages on a phone. It removes metadata. It does not let you edit it or add fields. The tool is free and runs in your browser.

• Formats: PDF, JPG (including .jfif), PNG, WebP and HEIC, which comes back as a JPG.
• TIFF, GIF, RAW photos, video and Office documents are not supported.
• A password-protected PDF has to be unlocked first. Save a copy without the password, then clean it.
• What the list shows is read in the browser and stays on the page. It is not sent anywhere.
• This is not legal or compliance advice. Check the rules that apply to you before you share a file.

Frequently Asked Questions

Sources

• Exif (Wikipedia)
• Extensible Metadata Platform (Wikipedia)

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