How to strip hidden data from a file before you share it

Photos remember where they were taken. Documents remember who wrote them. Here's how to see what yours are carrying, and remove it.

Files say more about you than their contents do. A photo from a phone typically records the exact coordinates where it was taken, the device that took it and the moment it happened. A Word document or PDF carries the author's name, the organisation, the software, how many revisions it went through and sometimes how long it was edited for. None of it is visible when you look at the file, and all of it travels when you send it.

The consequences are mundane far more often than they are dramatic: a photo posted for sale revealing a home address, a CV showing it was written on a current employer's licensed software, a supposedly independent report whose author field names someone else entirely.

Step-by-step

1. Open the tool. Go to Privacy & Security — "Sanitize before sharing" is the first tab.
2. Drop in a photo or PDF. JPG, PNG and PDF are inspected.
3. Read the report. Findings are listed in plain language and ranked, with GPS location and document author flagged as the ones that matter most.
4. Create a clean copy. For PDFs you can also strip annotations and attachments.
5. Check the re-scan. The tool re-inspects its own output and shows you what, if anything, remains.

What gets removed, and what doesn't

For images, the tool re-encodes the picture, which discards EXIF, GPS, camera details and text chunks. For PDFs it clears document properties and the XMP metadata block, deletes the creation and modification dates, and optionally removes annotations and embedded attachments.

What it cannot do is anything about the content itself. A street sign in the photograph, a face, a letterhead, a name in the body of the document — those are visible information, not metadata, and no cleaner touches them. For blacking out text in a PDF, use redaction instead. This is why the tool never tells you a file is "safe": it reports what it checked and what it changed, and leaves the judgement to you.

Habits worth having

• Strip before posting publicly — marketplace listings, forums and personal sites, where the audience is unknown.
• Watch the platforms. Major social networks strip metadata on upload; messaging apps, email and file-sharing links generally do not.
• Clean documents before sending them outside your organisation, especially anything built from an internal template.
• Screenshots are safer than photos for showing something from a picture, because they carry no camera data.

Frequently asked questions

Is the file uploaded to check it?

No — inspection and cleaning both happen in your browser, which would be a strange thing to get wrong on a privacy tool.

Does removing metadata hurt the image?

Re-encoding a JPEG is technically lossy, but at the quality used the difference is invisible. PNG output is lossless.

My photo shows "no metadata found" — is that right?

Quite possibly. Images already processed by an app, a social network or an earlier export often have none left. The report tells you what was actually there rather than assuming.