Remove PDF Metadata

Remove PDF Metadata deletes the places a PDF most often advertises who made it and how. It clears the document information dictionary — the /Info entries defined in PDF 32000-1 §14.3.3: Title, Author, Subject, Keywords, Creator, Producer, CreationDate and ModDate — together with any non-standard keys a particular writer added, such as /Company. It then deletes the XMP metadata packet, the XML description defined by ISO 16684-1 that many applications attach to a file (often repeating the same title and author), and it removes the trailer's file identifiers (the /ID pair) that tie a document to one specific file. Unlike an editor that only blanks the eight standard fields, this tool removes the entire /Info dictionary once it is empty, so the saved file has no document properties at all, and it writes no neutral Producer string back in their place.

Drop a PDF and it is read on the spot: the panel lists what was found in each of the three places before anything is changed. Click Remove metadata and the tool deletes those entries, re-saves the document and offers <name>-no-metadata.pdf to download. Your original file is not changed. If the PDF carries none of this metadata, the tool says so and offers no download, because there is nothing to remove.

What counts as "metadata" here is deliberately narrow, and it is worth knowing what that leaves out. XMP can also be attached to individual pages or to embedded objects by some producing applications; this tool looks only at the catalog's /Metadata stream, which is where the XMP packet almost always lives. Content is never touched: page text and images, page sizes, links, bookmarks and form fields are all kept exactly as they were, and the field appearance streams are not redrawn. The names inside form fields, the files attached to a PDF, and metadata baked into embedded objects are not covered.

Treat the result as a strong clean-up for sharing, not as an anonymiser. pdf-lib rewrites the whole file when saving rather than appending an incremental update, so in a straightforward document the old text is not left behind as a later revision — but strings can still survive inside embedded objects, form field names and attached files, and someone determined to inspect the raw bytes of a file may still recover traces. The rewrite also means a digital signature that covered the original file stops validating. Files that are password-protected or permission-locked are refused with a message rather than being written back broken.

Everything runs in your browser tab with pdf-lib; the PDF is never uploaded, and there is no server, no API and no account. You can confirm that in your browser's developer tools (Network tab): no request carries your document. Files up to 200 MB are accepted — the whole file is held in memory, so the limit keeps the tab from running out of it.

1. The file's leading bytes are checked for the PDF signature, then pdf-lib opens it with metadata updating switched off, so the library itself never stamps the file; an encrypted or damaged file is refused with a specific message. 2. The /Info dictionary is read directly — every key it holds, not only the eight standard ones — along with the catalog's /Metadata stream (and its decoded size) and the trailer's /ID. A value stored as a number or an array reads as blank rather than failing the whole read; a date is shown in UTC. 3. Every /Info entry is deleted. When the dictionary is left empty, the dictionary object and the trailer's /Info entry are deleted too, so the saved file has no document properties rather than empty ones. 4. The catalog's /Metadata entry is deleted, and the stream object behind it is deleted as well so it cannot be written into the new file as an orphan still carrying the XML. 5. The trailer's /ID pair is deleted. It is optional and only required alongside encryption, and encrypted files never reach this step. 6. The document is re-saved with object streams on and form-field appearances left as they are, so only the metadata changes, and it downloads as <name>-no-metadata.pdf.