I would like to share a PDF file on a forum anonymously. When I right click on file and go to 'Details' tab, it shows my computer name and owner name. How do I remove (hide) this information?
8,207 12 12 gold badges 49 49 silver badges 58 58 bronze badges asked Apr 25, 2011 at 21:43 387 1 1 gold badge 5 5 silver badges 10 10 bronze badgesTo prevent leaks in other cases (like screenshots, paths in logfiles, etc) too, rename your computer and your user to something generic.
Commented Apr 27 at 16:43Those details exist for files other than PDFs. The Owner and Computer details you wish to remove are used for permissioning and only exist on your local computer. When you share that file elsewhere, the details will not be in the file.
answered Apr 26, 2011 at 2:05 18.9k 15 15 gold badges 58 58 silver badges 69 69 bronze badges@Gareth: There may still be the Author field filled into the metadata of the PDF file itself, which may leak the same info @Prostak is trying to keep private.
Commented Aug 8, 2011 at 20:03@Prostak: you should also check the Document Properties. menu item which is is available from right-clicking into any of he PDF's pages when opened in Acrobat Reader or Acrobat Pro.
Commented Aug 8, 2011 at 20:04 This answer is wrong, author and creator tags will be still in the pdf file on other devices. Commented Jun 11, 2021 at 14:19 @Jens: Assuming you are right, do you happen to know of any way to achieve it? Commented Jan 15, 2022 at 21:42 @MichaelBeijer the answer I upvoted is : superuser.com/a/1013994 Commented Jan 17, 2022 at 15:17If you want to remove attributes and metadata from a PDF without using additional programs, you can open the PDF with Google Chrome, click print, and then select the Save As PDF setting from Chrome. Save the PDF and you'll see the data cleared when you go to File -> Properties in a PDF that was previously protected.
Sometimes, Adobe PDFs are strange in that none of your "properties" tab based advice worked, as least as far as removing names from a Comment box. They seem to do incremental or one-place only author name removals. If you like to comment in documents, then make the first comment, so that the comment box will pop-up. Then, remove the author's or login name and select "Make Current Properties Default" so that the remaining comment boxes also don't show the author's names.
Unfortunately, you'll need to follow the other advice on this page to remove the overall author's name, like going to Property tabs.
answered Jul 30, 2012 at 12:35 39 2 2 bronze badges
I'm going to assume you're using Windows. If you right click and choose "properties" on the .pdf, then choose the "details" tab there is an option to "Remove Properties and Personal Information". You can choose what to remove, either some or all of the properties.
answered Apr 25, 2011 at 22:36 6,679 11 11 gold badges 46 46 silver badges 65 65 bronze badges I wasn't able to remove 'Owner' and 'Computer' information when I followed your steps. Commented Apr 25, 2011 at 23:03 @Prostak, see Gareth's answer above. Commented Apr 26, 2011 at 7:24The "Remove Properties and Personal Information" feature is not enough when dealing with PDF files. The problem is not the 'Owner' and 'Computer' informations (don't care about those ones, read Gareth's answer), but the 'Title', 'Author', 'Subject', 'Keywords' fields that you can see inside your PDF Reader.
Commented Jan 2, 2017 at 11:23I made it. Just go the document Word version, click save as, then before select "pdf" under "Save as type:", delete all is in the field "Authors:" and also click on "options" button on this window and deselect in the pop up window the "document properties" and "document structure tags for accessibility". Then click "ok" and "Save". Ta da!:)
answered Jun 20, 2017 at 20:37 31 1 1 bronze badgeI downloaded exiftool from (https://exiftool.org/) then you can run it specifically for any file you want to remove all metadata. Here is the command from Windows
exiftool -all= example.pdf I use Foxit Phantom PDF Business
Per the manual for Foxit Phantom Business, version 7.3, page 240 of 311 in the PDF (numbered page 239)
Remove Hidden Data
Foxit PhantomPDF supports to sanitize documents by removing the hidden information that is private or sensitive for users from their PDFs, generally including metadata, embedded content and attached files, scripts, etc.
You can remove hidden data from a PDF by one-click, please go to PROTECT > Hidden Data > Sanitize Document
. . . In my case, 7 PDFs went from a total of 109.0 MB to 56.5 MB. There was just a little highlighting done in one of the PDFs.
