Scrubbing File Metadata with exiftool

Gist

The files that we upload and send all over the internet have a lot of data attached to them that we often forget about. This metadata can tell others a lot about us that we don’t necessarily need other people to know. Picture files like JPEGs, PNGs, and even GIFs can hold metadata with custom values that show information about the history of the file.

In my case, I hate sending any technical information about my system to potential employers with embedded metadata in my job application. Since I use several different pieces of software to compose my resume and cover letters, I’d rather have that custom data scrubbed from the PDF files I make before I send it off to potential employers.

That is where exiftool comes in. This tool will let you modify or clear the EXIF metadata in a file. You can get it from brew on Mac:

brew install exiftool

Once you have it removing all extra metadata from a file is trivial. Exiftool takes parameters for which tags should be updated and the values to update them to. Setting ‘all’ to ” will effectively clear the tags on a file.

exiftool -all= /path/to/file.pdf