| name | strip-metadata |
| description | Remove all metadata from a PDF — author, title, producer, creation date, comments, embedded XMP, and document info dictionary. Useful before sharing or printing externally. Triggers on phrases like "strip metadata", "remove author info", "scrub PDF metadata", "anonymize this PDF". |
Strip PDF Metadata
Wipe all identifying metadata from a PDF.
Inputs
- Input PDF path (required).
- Output path (optional) — defaults to
<input>-clean.pdf.
What gets stripped
- Document Info dictionary:
/Title, /Author, /Subject, /Keywords, /Creator, /Producer, /CreationDate, /ModDate.
- XMP metadata stream.
- Annotations and comments (optional, ask user).
Tooling
exiftool is the most thorough — it handles both legacy Info dict and XMP.
Recipe
exiftool -all:all= -overwrite_original_in_place=false -o output.pdf input.pdf
To also remove XMP and re-linearize cleanly, follow up with qpdf:
qpdf --linearize output.pdf output-final.pdf && mv output-final.pdf output.pdf
Verification
exiftool output.pdf
pdfinfo output.pdf
Both should show empty/default values for Author, Title, Producer, etc.
Caveats
Producer and Creator may repopulate if downstream tools touch the file. Run strip-metadata last in any pipeline.- Embedded fonts and form metadata are not stripped — this skill targets identifying info only.
Output
Metadata-stripped PDF. Original preserved.
