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Remove metadata

Clear the title, author, subject, keywords and internal metadata from your PDF.

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Remove PDF Metadata Free — Strip Hidden Author, GPS, and Timestamp Data

FusionPDF strips all metadata from PDFs in your browser using pdf-lib: author name, company, creation date, modification timestamps, GPS coordinates from mobile scans, and editing software history. The cleaned PDF downloads with no hidden identity data embedded. No upload, no account required.

What Metadata Is Hidden in a PDF?

Every PDF contains a set of data fields that describe the document, separate from the visible content. These fields are not visible when you open the file normally, but they are readable by anyone with a PDF inspector or metadata viewer. The standard DocInfo fields include: Author, Creator (the application that created the document), Producer (the software that output the PDF), CreationDate, ModDate (modification date), Title, Subject, and Keywords.

Beyond these standard fields, some PDFs contain XMP metadata, an extended format that can hold additional properties set by the authoring software. Adobe Acrobat, for example, embeds its version number and the editing history of the document. InDesign adds the document structure. PDFs created from scanned images on a smartphone may include GPS coordinates in the embedded image metadata, which can reveal the physical location where the scan was taken.

Why Metadata Removal Matters

Metadata exposure is a real and documented risk. In a well-known incident, a French law firm submitted expert legal documents to a court that contained author names and editing software details embedded in the PDF metadata. The opposing party used that information to identify the experts and challenge their impartiality. Similar issues arise regularly when PDFs are submitted to press, clients, or regulatory bodies without metadata cleaning.

Beyond legal contexts, metadata reveals which software your organization uses (useful intelligence for competitors), who drafted a document (which may contradict a public position), when it was created and last edited (which can undermine negotiation timelines), and where it was created if GPS data is present. Removing metadata before sharing is a basic document hygiene practice.

How to Remove PDF Metadata

The process takes under ten seconds. Drop your PDF into the upload area. The tool reads the current metadata and displays each field so you can see exactly what is embedded. Click Clean and download. The tool uses pdf-lib to clear all standard DocInfo and XMP fields, then writes a new clean PDF that downloads immediately. The page content is untouched.

  • Drop or select your PDF file
  • Review the detected metadata fields shown in the preview
  • Click Clean and download
  • The downloaded PDF contains no metadata fields

What the Tool Removes

The tool clears all standard PDF metadata fields: Author, Title, Subject, Keywords, Creator, Producer, CreationDate, and ModDate. These cover both the DocInfo dictionary (the original PDF metadata format) and the corresponding XMP metadata stream. After processing, a PDF inspector will return empty values for all these fields.

Note that metadata removal is applied to the document-level metadata fields. If your PDF contains embedded images that carry their own EXIF metadata (such as GPS coordinates from a phone camera), those image-level fields are inside the image binary and are not modified by this tool. For a complete privacy clean on scanned documents, remove GPS data from the source images before creating the PDF.

Metadata Removal vs. Redaction: What Is the Difference?

These are two different operations that solve different problems. Metadata removal cleans the invisible data fields attached to the document. It has no effect on the visible page content. Redaction, by contrast, removes or permanently blacks out visible content on the page, such as names, account numbers, or addresses that appear in the text.

If you have a document that contains sensitive visible content AND metadata you want to remove, you need both tools. Use the Redact tool first to black out visible sensitive content, then use this Remove Metadata tool on the resulting PDF to strip the hidden fields. Running them in this order gives you a fully clean output.

Read more: The complete PDF privacy guide: metadata, redaction, and what your documents reveal