About Remove PDF metadata
Every PDF carries a block of information that is never displayed. Open the document properties in any reader and you will typically find an author name, the software that produced it, the exact creation and modification times, and sometimes a subject line and keywords nobody intended to publish.
That information travels with the file. Send a CV and the recipient can often see your full account name, which word processor you use, and when you last edited it — including that you edited it four minutes before sending. Publish a report and readers can see which internal template it came from. None of this is hidden maliciously; it is simply written by the software and never surfaced again.
This tool clears it and tells you what it found. You get back two files: the cleaned PDF, and a short text file listing exactly which fields were present and what they contained. That second file matters — a tool that silently claims to have removed something gives you no way to know whether there was anything there, or whether it worked.
Fields cleared: Title, Author, Subject, Keywords, Creator, Producer, and both timestamps. Dates are set to the Unix epoch rather than deleted, because a PDF with structurally absent dates is unusual enough to be its own signal. You can keep the title with the toggle, since a meaningful title is often genuinely wanted and rarely identifying.
What this does not remove. This clears document-level metadata, not content. Text inside the page is untouched — if your name appears in the letterhead, it is still there. Embedded images keep their own EXIF data. Annotations and comments retain their authors. Digital signatures are invalidated by any modification, which is inherent to signing.
Most importantly, it does not redact. Text hidden under a black rectangle is still text and can still be copied out. Genuine redaction means deleting the underlying content, which is a different operation and one worth doing in dedicated software when the stakes are real.
Why this runs locally. A tool for removing identifying information from a document is a strange thing to use by uploading that document, with its identifying information intact, to a server run by someone you have never met. Here the file never leaves your device.
Questions
What exactly is removed?
Title, Author, Subject, Keywords, Creator, Producer, and the creation and modification timestamps. You also get a text file listing what was found, so you can confirm it worked.
Does this redact text in the document?
No. It clears document metadata only. Page content is untouched, and text hidden under a black box remains copyable. Real redaction requires deleting the underlying content.
Why are the dates set to 1970 instead of removed?
A PDF with structurally missing dates is unusual enough to be a signal in itself. The epoch is a valid, uninformative value.
Does it strip EXIF from images inside the PDF?
No. Embedded images keep their own metadata. This operates on the document-level fields.
Is my document uploaded?
No — which is rather the point. Uploading a document in order to remove its identifying information would defeat the exercise.