Remove PDF metadata

A PDF isn't just the page you see. Most editors also write a document-info dictionary — Author, the software that produced it, creation and modification dates — and often a separate XMP metadata packet that can log its own history of save events. On top of that, if the file was saved incrementally rather than fully rewritten, earlier drafts of the document, including their own metadata, can still be sitting inside the file's raw bytes, recoverable by the same kind of tool this suite's own PDF Time Machine is built around. None of that is visible when you open the file in a normal reader, which is exactly why it's easy to send a PDF without realizing what's still attached to it.

When people search for how to remove PDF metadata, they usually mean one of two things stored inside the file: the document-info fields (Author, Producer, Title, Subject, Keywords, and timestamps), or the embedded XMP packet — a separate, more detailed metadata block some editors write alongside it, sometimes with its own edit-history log. A thorough PDF properties remover needs to catch both, plus two things people rarely think to check: orphaned objects left behind by earlier edits, and author or timestamp fields quietly attached to comments and annotations. PDF History Cleaner scans for all four categories, not just the obvious one.

PDF History Cleaner never removes anything sight-unseen. It first reports, in plain language, exactly what it found: which document-info fields are set and to what, whether an XMP packet is present and how many history events it logs, how many hidden earlier versions the file contains, how many orphaned objects (leftover data no longer used by the document) it found, and whether any annotations carry an author name or timestamp. Only after that report do you choose what to strip.

Each category — document info, XMP, hidden revision history, orphaned objects, annotation author metadata — is its own checkbox, so this isn't an all-or-nothing metadata removal tool. You can clear metadata from a PDF selectively: clean only the XMP history while leaving the Author field intact, or flatten the revision history without touching annotations. Nothing about visible page content, text, images, form fields, or accessibility tags is ever touched by any of these categories — only the hidden data you actually choose to remove.

There's no install and no account. Drop a file onto the upload zone (or click to browse) and the tool scans it and reports exactly what it found — document-info fields, an XMP packet, hidden earlier versions, orphaned objects, annotation metadata — with an honest "none found" for any category that's empty. From there, pick what to clean: everything is pre-checked except categories with nothing to remove, so a single click on Clean & Download is usually enough to scrub metadata from a PDF and get a cleaned file back. Prefer more control? Uncheck individual document-info fields, or leave the revision history untouched — flattening it is the one prerequisite the other categories all depend on, since an earlier revision keeps its own copy of anything you remove until the file is reduced to one final version.

PDF History Cleaner is a free online PDF metadata remover — some call this kind of tool a metadata remover for PDF files, others a PDF properties remover, but the job is the same either way: delete metadata from a PDF without sending it anywhere. Scanning and cleaning both run as JavaScript inside your browser tab, in a background worker so the page never freezes on a large file. There's no upload endpoint for the file to go to, which means this works as a way to delete metadata from a PDF online without the usual privacy trade-off of an "online" tool — your document, and everything in it, never leaves your device. Close the tab and nothing is retained.