How to Remove Metadata from a PDF (and What It Reveals)

Removing metadata from a PDF is a small habit with an outsized payoff, because PDFs routinely carry facts about their origin that nobody meant to send. Most people have never looked at what their documents disclose.

The short answer

1. Open PDF Tools from the BizTray tray.
2. Add the PDF.
3. Clear the document metadata.
4. Save.

Nothing is uploaded, which is somewhat the point of an operation about not disclosing things.

What is actually in there

Open any PDF's document properties and you will usually find:

• Author — often a real person's full name, or a Windows username.
• Title — frequently not the document's title but the original file name.
• Subject and keywords — sometimes left over from a template.
• Creator and Producer — the application and version that made it. Producer: Microsoft Word 2013 tells a reader something about your setup.
• Creation and modification dates — often revealing that "today's report" was last touched two years ago.

The classic disclosures, in rough order of how often they bite:

• Somebody else's name in the Author field. You built the document from a colleague's template or a downloaded form, and it carried their name through the conversion. Now your invoice is authored by a stranger.
• A file name that was never meant to be read. offer-letter-lowball-v2 and application-backup-plan both survive as the Title field long after the file has been sensibly renamed on disk.
• A modification date that contradicts the covering note. "I've just updated this" against a timestamp from last spring.
• Your Windows username. Frequently firstname.lastname, which is often also the shape of your work email address.

None of these are catastrophic. All of them are avoidable, and all of them are the kind of thing that is embarrassing precisely because it was unintentional.

When it is worth doing

• CVs and job applications. The most-shared document most people produce, and the one where a template author's name or a final-final-v6 title reads worst.
• Anything built from a downloaded template. Assume the author field is not yours.
• Documents published on the web. Metadata travels with the file and is trivially readable by anyone who downloads it.
• Anything you are sending on someone else's behalf, where your name in the Author field would be a disclosure in itself.

What clearing metadata does not do

Be precise about the boundary:

• It does not change the visible content. Metadata is data about the file. If your name is printed on page one, that stays — this is not redaction.
• It is not encryption. The contents remain fully readable. To restrict them, add a password.
• Flattening does not do it. Flattening merges form fields into the page and leaves metadata untouched. The two are separate passes and both are worth doing before circulating a filled form.
• Cropping does not do it either — and cropping does not even remove the page content it hides.

If you need something on the page gone rather than in the file properties, the reliable route is converting that page to an image and rebuilding, because the underlying text otherwise stays in the document.

Doing it on your own machine

PDF Tools clears metadata alongside watermarking, page numbers, flattening and adding or removing passwords — no file-size cap, no watermark, no account, and nothing uploaded.

That last part is worth dwelling on for this operation specifically. Uploading a document to a third-party service in order to reduce what third parties learn about it is self-defeating. The whole exercise only makes sense done locally.

A folder of documents can be cleaned in one batch — sensible before publishing a set of files or archiving a project.

A note on why this is free

BizTray shares a portion of your spare internet bandwidth through a vetted partner rather than charging you. It relays other parties' web traffic and never touches your documents. Sharing is switchable off from Settings or the tray, and the tools do not run while it is off. See How it's funded.

Related

• How to flatten a PDF — the other pre-send pass.
• How to password protect a PDF — protecting contents rather than properties.
• How to add a watermark to a PDF — marking a document's status.