Universal File Metadata Purger

Almost every file carries metadata, information that describes the file itself. Photos store the capture time, phone model and GPS location; PDFs record the author’s name, the software used and creation and modification dates; Word (DOCX) files keep the author, last modified by, company and revision count. Before you send a CV, a tender, an official document or an anonymous submission, these invisible fields can reveal your real name, employer or location, or even which template the document came from.

The tool supports JPG, PNG, PDF and DOCX files up to 50 MB each, and handles each format differently. For JPEG it cuts the APP1 segments that hold EXIF and XMP data. For PNG it removes text and time chunks such as tEXt, iTXt, zTXt, eXIf and tIME. For PDF it clears the Author, Creator, Producer and CreationDate fields of the document information. For DOCX it cleans the author and revision data in docProps/core.xml. After upload it first lists the privacy markers it found, so you can decide whether to purge them.

Unlike our EXIF purger, which redraws the image, this tool removes metadata directly from the file’s binary structure. Image pixels are never re-compressed, so quality is identical to the original and the file often gets slightly smaller. It focuses on the most common metadata fields, though: if a PDF contains an embedded XMP metadata stream, attachments or annotations, or a Word file has tracked changes and comments, also check them in the original application, for example with Word’s Inspect Document feature.

All analysis and cleaning run in your browser, the file is never uploaded, and you download a clean copy while the original stays untouched. Spending a few seconds on this before sending important documents is a worthwhile privacy habit.