Skip to content

Instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

@Te-k

Te-k/pdf_metadata.md

Created November 26, 2020 10:31
Show Gist options
  • Save Te-k/e504d9586377c36c75ba131c4280f5fb to your computer and use it in GitHub Desktop.
Save Te-k/e504d9586377c36c75ba131c4280f5fb to your computer and use it in GitHub Desktop.
Download ZIP
How to remove metadata from PDFs
Raw
pdf_metadata.md

Many tools do not fully remove metadata, but just remove the link with in the metadata table. The data are thus still available in the PDF file itself.

While a lot of people rely on Exiftool to remove metadata, it actually does the same in PDFs. If you remove metadata with exiftool -all= some.pdf, you can always restore the data with exiftool -pdf-update:all= some.pdf.

There are several options to remove PDF metadata safely:

Option 1 : Exiftool with qpdf

  • Remove metadata with exiftool : exiftool -all= some.pdf
  • Then remove ununsed objects with qpdf : qpdf --linearize some.pdf - > some.cleaned.pdf

Option 2 : MAT

Use MAT2, a python library with a command line tool.

Option 3 : DangerZone

Uses DangerZone, that has a GUI interface for Windows, Mac OS and Linux (but is quite heavy).

(DangerZone is based on formerly pdf-redact-tools which can also be an option)

@Moon1moon
Copy link

Hi, do you know how good this tool for removing metadata?
https://github.com/szTheory/exifcleaner

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment