The metadata that travels with your documents (and how to leave it behind)
A PDF holds more than what you can see. Author, software and timestamps ride along wherever it goes. A new files.co tool shows them and strips them, without uploading anything.
Every time you save a document as a PDF, the program signs its work. Nothing shady about it — that is how the format works: there is a small dictionary inside the file recording the author, the title, the application that produced it and the dates. Nobody ever looks at it, until somebody does.
You can now look at it with PDF metadata viewer, out today on files.co.
An ordinary example
A contract arrives as a PDF. The first page says a company signed it. The metadata says it was created in “Word 2016” on somebody’s laptop, under a username that was their first and last name, on a Tuesday at 23:47.
None of that is a state secret, but none of it was consciously shared either. In published documents — reports, rulings, tenders — it has produced its share of awkward headlines, with the real author of an anonymous text sitting in the file’s Author field.
What the report shows
Drop in a PDF and you get the whole picture:
- Pages, weight, format version and the dimensions of the first page.
- The metadata table: title, author, subject, keywords, which program created it, which one produced it, and the dates.
- Tags for things worth knowing: whether it is password protected, how many form fields it has, how many annotations, whether files are embedded inside it, and whether it carries an XMP packet.
Plus a clear warning if the document contains embedded JavaScript or an action that fires when it opens. A PDF is allowed to carry code, and while it is nearly always harmless, knowing before you trust the file costs nothing.
Removing it is tick and download
Choose which fields to clear — all ticked by default — and download a clean copy. Nothing is padded with blanks: the keys are gone from the file. You can check for yourself by running the result back through the tool.
Page content stays untouched. If the sensitive detail is written into the document itself, this will not help: that is redaction, a different job, and one worth doing properly because a black rectangle drawn on top erases nothing.
The part that matters
All of this happens in your browser. It sounds like a technical footnote, but it changes what the tool means: a site that inspects your metadata by uploading the file is asking for precisely what you were trying to avoid. Here the PDF stays on your machine, and if you disconnect from the internet after the page loads, the tool carries on working.