How to Remove PDF Metadata

Open any PDF's properties in Adobe Reader or Apple Preview and you'll see fields for Author, Title, Subject, Keywords, Creator, Producer, plus creation and modification dates. None of that is visible when you read the document — but it's all in the file, trivial to extract, and almost never flattering.

The Author field is usually your real name, copied from your operating system account when Word or Pages exported the PDF. Creator and Producer reveal exactly what software you used (and possibly the version). Timestamps show when you wrote and edited it. Scanned PDFs can also embed GPS coordinates from the scanner or camera.

If you're sharing a PDF publicly — to a journalist, on a forum, on a public records request — that metadata can identify you, your employer, your location, and your software setup. Whistleblowers and corporate leakers have been identified this way more than once.

Three steps:

1. 1Open the Remove Metadata tool and load your PDF.
2. 2Review the detected fields (author, title, subject, keywords, creator, producer, dates, any custom XMP fields).
3. 3Hit 'Strip metadata'. A clean copy downloads immediately, processed locally. Your original file is not modified.

Stripped: author, title, subject, keywords, creator, producer, creation date, modification date, and any custom XMP metadata fields.

Kept: page content (text, images, vectors), bookmarks, links, form fields, and digital signatures. The document looks and works the same as before.

Hidden layers, comments, and embedded file attachments can carry their own metadata. If you're sanitizing for high-stakes release (legal, journalistic, government), enable the 'full sanitization' option to strip those too. For everyday sharing, the standard strip is enough.

Metadata has been the source of countless real-world leaks. A 2018 audit of court filings found that 1 in 8 redacted PDFs still had the underlying text accessible — and nearly all of them still had author metadata pointing to the lawyer who filed them. Corporate leaks have been traced to specific employees via Creator software + edit timestamps.

Government agencies and newsrooms (CIA, NSA, Reuters, NYT) all sanitize PDFs before publication. It's a 5-second step that prevents a 5-month scandal.

PrivacyScanPDF strips metadata locally in your browser. Uploading a PDF to a server-based 'metadata remover' to 'protect your privacy' is self-defeating — you've just handed them the document.