Edit or strip PDF metadata — without uploading

Every PDF carries a set of descriptive fields most people never look at: the author name, the title, the software that produced it, and creation and modification dates. Those fields are populated automatically, usually from your operating system account and your word processor, and they travel with the file wherever it goes.

The consequences are routine and easy to miss. A CV sent to an employer can carry a previous employer's name or a real name someone does not use professionally. A contract can reveal the law firm whose template produced it. A document circulated as anonymous can carry the author's full name in the Info dictionary. An "anonymised" submission can be traced back to a specific person's laptop account.

Drop a PDF here and every field is shown immediately — reading it locally, in your browser, with nothing uploaded. Given the tool exists to remove identifying information, uploading the file to inspect it would rather defeat the purpose.

You can edit the six standard PDF Info fields individually — title, author, subject, keywords, creator, and producer. Setting a proper title is worth doing for documents that will be published, since many viewers show the title rather than the filename in the window bar, and search engines use it for indexed PDFs.

Or use Strip all metadata to clear the lot. That also removes the embedded XMP metadata stream, which matters: XMP is a second, separate metadata block that many tools leave behind even after the Info fields are cleared, so a file can look scrubbed while still carrying the original author name.

Editing metadata never touches page content. The pages, text, and images are byte-for-byte what they were — only the descriptive fields are rewritten.

Removing metadata is not the same as anonymising a document, and it is worth being precise about the difference. Stripping the Info and XMP fields removes what the file says about itself. It does not touch what is visible on the pages: a letterhead, a signature, a name in the body text, or a header are all page content and stay exactly where they are.

It also does not remove text hidden under redaction boxes drawn as black rectangles. That is the single most common redaction failure — the text is still in the file underneath the shape and can be selected, copied, or extracted. If you need to check what text a document really contains, extract the text and read what comes out.

Sharing something sensitive? Consider watermarking it to mark its status and password-protecting it to control who can open it.