Document Hygiene
Choose an image or PDF and this page inspects the metadata hiding inside it — camera model, GPS coordinates, author, editing software, timestamps — and tells you what a recipient could learn from the file. When a safe lossless scrub is possible, you can download a cleaned copy whose pixels or page content are byte-for-byte untouched.
Inspect a document
Inspection report
Privacy report
No privacy-sensitive metadata was found in this file.
Why metadata hygiene matters
Photos and documents routinely carry far more than the pixels or text you see. A phone photo can record the exact GPS coordinates of where it was taken, the camera model, and the moment it was shot. A PDF exported from a word processor often embeds the author's name, the company software that produced it, and creation and modification timestamps. When you share such a file publicly — an auction listing, a forum post, a resale ad — that embedded data travels with it, and anyone who downloads it can read it.
- GPS coordinates reveal where a photo was taken, sometimes down to the meter.
- Camera model and software fingerprint your devices and workflow.
- Author and creator fields can expose a real name or employer that the visible content never shows.
- Timestamps tell readers when a file was made and last touched.
This tool's job is to make that hidden layer visible before you share — and to remove it when you don't want it.
How it works
When you choose a file, the page reads it entirely in memory. For images it detects the format from the file's magic bytes, reads the pixel dimensions, and parses embedded EXIF metadata; for PDFs it reads the document information dictionary and XMP metadata. Each privacy-relevant field is classified by severity — GPS is high, device and author fields medium, descriptions and dates low.
The scrubbed copy is produced losslessly: for JPEG, PNG, and WebP images the page removes only the metadata segments or chunks (EXIF, XMP, text chunks, timestamps) and writes the rest of the file back byte-for-byte — the image data is never re-encoded, so there is no quality loss. For PDFs it rebuilds the document without the metadata dictionary and XMP stream while preserving every page and its content.
What scrubbing does — and doesn't do
Images. The scrub removes EXIF (including GPS), XMP, Photoshop IRB, and PNG text/time chunks. It does not re-encode pixels, so there is no quality loss and the picture itself is untouched. Two limitations: GIF files have no standard EXIF container, so there is nothing to strip, and some formats a browser cannot parse are rejected with a clear message. Remember that the visible content of an image (a street sign, a face, a screen) is never removed by any metadata tool.
PDFs. The scrub removes the document metadata dictionary and XMP stream — title, author, subject, keywords, creator, producer, and dates. It deliberately preserves the page content: text, images, links, form fields, annotations, and embedded attachments are not removed. A PDF whose pages themselves contain sensitive text needs a redaction tool, not a metadata scrub.
Scope. This prototype inspects one file at a time, supports JPEG, PNG, WebP, and GIF images plus PDF documents, and scrubs JPEG, PNG, and WebP images plus PDFs. Before sharing a scrubbed file, open it once to confirm it still looks and reads exactly as you expect.