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Created September 18, 2024 02:14
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How to remove metadata from PDFs
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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)

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