How to try to remove Metadata using exiftool? #474

What OS are you using (Windows/Mac/Linux)? Do you have any experience using the command line (CMD/PowerShell/Terminal/Bash)?

If all you want to edit is PDFs, then read below. If you plan on dealing with other file types, such as images (JPG/WebP/PNG) or videos (MP4/MOV), then I can help work you through the steps needed.

Editing PDFs

If you want to remove metadata from PDFs, then exiftool is not the best tool to use. Because of the way that exiftool removes metadata from PDFs, the edits are entirely reversible unless you run another command line program on the file (qpdf). I haven't tested it out yet to see if it removes everything.

Actually, checking now, it looks like qpdf has an option to remove metadata that I don't think was there the last time I looked over the documentation, so it may be possible to just use that.

If you want to continue with these options, then answer my questions above, and I'll try to walk you through it step by step.

Another option is BentoPDF. It is an open source PDF editor that is quite good. It runs entirely in your browser. From what I've read on Reddit, there isn't any security or privacy issues with it.

BentoPDF has an online editor here. Go to that page, hit Control+K, type "san" and a button for the "Sanitize PDF" tool comes up. Click that, drop your PDF onto it, keep the default options, and click the "Sanitize PDF" button at the bottom. The sanitized PDF will quickly be downloaded into your default download directory.

Normally, I don't recommend online tools because you don't know what's happening behind the scenes. You never know when you upload a file if the website is saving it and extracting sensitive data. But, as I said, BentoPDF runs entirely in your browser and the PDF is not uploaded.

On the more technical side, you can run BentoPDF entirely on your own computer (self-host). This is what I do. Docker needs to be installed on your computer, but that's relatively easy to do. Then you just need to run two docker commands and it becomes available in your web browser.

Doing some searches, I found a few other GUI options. PDF24 Creator, BeCyPDFMetaEdit (both Windows) and PDF Arranger (cross-platform).

BeCyPDFMetaEdit is the only one I've heard of, but I've never used it.

If you search online, you may come across PDFGear. It is a free program that you can use to edit PDFs. DO NOT USE IT! PDFGear is believed to be spyware at the very least. You will see a lot of posts on sites like Reddit that promote it. That is because they are believed to be using bots to spam posts recommending it.

See this Reddit post for more details.