Remove PDF Metadata

What gets removed

The cleaner rewrites the document so that nothing identifying is left in the metadata, not just hidden.

• Title, Author, Subject, Keywords, Creator, and Producer are cleared
• The embedded XMP packet, which often repeats those fields and adds editing history, is deleted from the file
• Creation and modification dates are replaced with the time of cleaning
• The old values are removed from the saved bytes, so a text search of the file no longer finds them

What metadata removal does not change

Only the document-level metadata is touched. Visible text, images, annotations, form fields, bookmarks, and attachments stay exactly as they were. Names typed inside the document, in comments, or in a tracked-changes export are content, not metadata; delete those in the source document or redact them before you share.

Remove PDF metadata on a Mac

Preview shows the fields under Tools → Show Inspector but offers no way to delete them. The usual options:

PaperKit

Open this page in Safari or Chrome, drop the PDF, click Remove Metadata. No install, nothing leaves the Mac.

exiftool

In Terminal: exiftool -all:all= file.pdf. Note that exiftool only marks the old metadata as deleted; rewrite the file with qpdf (qpdf --linearize in.pdf out.pdf) to remove it for good.

Print to PDF

Printing to a new PDF drops the author but can also drop links, bookmarks, and text quality. Use it as a last resort.

Remove PDF metadata in Adobe Acrobat

Acrobat Reader can display properties but cannot clear them. In Acrobat Pro, File → Properties → Description lets you blank the fields by hand. To strip everything at once, including comments, attachments, and hidden text, use Tools → Redact → Sanitize Document (or Remove Hidden Information), then save under a new name.

Windows and Linux

On Windows, Explorer's "Remove Properties and Personal Information" option works for photos and Office files but does nothing for PDFs. On Linux, exiftool and qpdf work as on the Mac, and pdftk can rewrite the Info fields with update_info. PaperKit works in any browser on both without installing anything.

Batch: clean several PDFs at once

Drop as many PDFs as you need. The inspector shows the first file, every file is cleaned with the same rules, and each one downloads as paperkit-clean-<original name>.pdf.

Why clean metadata before sharing

Résumés built from a template often carry the template author as the document author. Legal filings, anonymous peer-review submissions, tenders, and whistleblower documents can leak a name, an employer, or an internal file name through metadata alone. Clearing it takes one click and costs nothing in quality.