We tested 7 PDF metadata removers. Six left the GPS in.

What we hid in the file

Removing metadata sounds like one job. It is at least five, and most tools only do the first. So we built a single PDF carrying one of each, with exact values planted in exact places — that way "did the tool remove it" has an answer rather than an impression, and anyone rerunning this gets the same number we did.

• A photograph with its EXIF intact — camera make and model, a photographer's name, and GPS coordinates at a known latitude.
• A review comment tagged with a reviewer's name and the moment they wrote it.
• An attached spreadsheet, riding along inside the document.
• A script set to run the moment the file is opened.
• Ordinary document properties — the Title, Author and Producer fields that a properties dialog shows you.

Then each returned file was read back and searched for those exact values: in its raw bytes, in its parsed object graph, and in every decoded object including the ones nothing points at. That third check matters more than it sounds, and it is the one nearly everybody skips.

What came back

The pattern is consistent. These tools clean the document layer — the fields a PDF reader shows in its properties dialog — and stop there. That is a defensible reading of the word "metadata". It is not what someone stripping a document before sending it to a stranger believes they are getting.

Two things the table cannot show you

The script did not just survive — in two files it was hiding. All six left the open-on-load JavaScript in place, which is bad enough. In two of them the script text did not appear in a plain search of the file at all, because the object had been packed into a compressed stream. Present, runnable, and invisible to anyone checking by eye.

Deleting a reference is not deleting the thing. One tool cleared the reviewer's name from the annotation, and the name was still sitting in the file somewhere else, recoverable. We know this failure well because we shipped it ourselves, and only caught it by writing a third kind of check — how we test explains why the two obvious ways of verifying a cleaned PDF both report it as clean.

Do they do what they claim?

This is the fairer question, and it has the more interesting answer. A tool that says it clears the author field and clears the author field is working correctly, however narrow that is. So we went back and read what each one actually promises.

IronSoftware comes out of this best. It is the least ambitious tool in the test. It names four fields, removes four fields, and never suggests it does more. That is the whole trick, and it is the only one of the six whose description of itself we could not fault.

Metadata2Go is the one that stings. Its page warns that metadata "can include sensitive details like your location". Location is the harm it picks out by name — and the file it handed back still had the coordinates sitting in it.

So are these tools bad? Mostly, no. Most of them do roughly what they say. The problem is that what they say is far narrower than what "remove PDF metadata" sounds like to someone about to email a document to a stranger. And in the two places the wording reaches further, it reaches for exactly the thing it does not deliver.

Why Adobe Acrobat Pro is not scored here

Because we did not run it, and a results table is no place to guess. Acrobat is the reason this category has a standard at all: Sanitize Document went after image EXIF, annotation authorship, attachments and scripts years before anything free did, and every tool above is measured against a bar Adobe set. Leaving it out entirely would have been a quiet way of pretending otherwise, so it sits at the top of the claims table, marked untested.

We skipped it because it is paid desktop software and we are not trying to contest it. That choice has a cost worth naming: every Adobe cell on this page is Adobe describing their own product, which is precisely the kind of evidence the rest of this report exists to distrust. We are not going to pretend our untested cells are worth more than anyone else's.

Fixing that takes one licence and about ten minutes. The test files are public and the checker is a single command. If you have Acrobat Pro — or you work at Adobe — run it and send us what comes back at hello@lyonite.com. We reply within 48 hours and publish what we get, credited and dated, whichever way it goes — including if it beats us on all five.

So which one should you use?

Cleaning is not the only thing that decides a tool, and one test file cannot tell you about batches, encryption or price. Short version:

The one thing none of the six do, at any price, is check their own work. They clean the file, tell you it is cleaned, and that is the end of it. Ours re-opens the file it just wrote, reads it back with the same inspector the viewer tab uses, and reports from that — including anything it skipped and why. A cleaner that only ever lists its wins is teaching you to trust it further than it has earned.

What this test cannot tell you

One file, one run, one day. A tool may behave differently on a different document, and any of these may have improved since publication — which is exactly why the test files ship alongside the finding instead of being described and kept.

On the two that changed nothing: Metadata2Go and PDF Candy returned files with Title, Author, Subject and Keywords entirely intact. Both use a field-by-field interface where removal is a separate confirmed step, and that step was applied in both cases before downloading. This was not a missed button — we are saying so up front because it is the first thing anyone will ask.

And we are not neutral here. We build one of the tools in that table and it sits at the top of it. That is exactly why the file, the method and the checker are all public. We are not asking you to trust us. We are handing you the file.

Questions people ask about this