Anonymize a PDF
A PDF carries far more than its pages, and that is where privacy is lost. Twelve hiding places are listed with their real contents — author, properties, GPS coordinates left inside photos, attachments, comments, scripts, hidden layers, invisible text — and you decide what goes.
Free · 100% local — nothing is uploaded- 1Open your PDF.
- 2Read the inventory: every hiding place is named, with what it really holds.
- 3Remove what you want and download the anonymized document.
How to anonymize a PDF
Open the document: Vélin lists twelve hiding places and shows you what they really hold, without jargon — the author’s name and the producing software, the GPS coordinates left in embedded photographs, the attachments, the bookmarks, the comments and their authors, the form fields and their values, the scripts, the hidden layers, the thumbnails, the structure tags, the off-page objects and the text made invisible. You tick what should go and download a document stripped of it. This is the check one runs before publishing a file, posting it on a site, attaching it to a tender response or passing it to a third party. Nothing is uploaded: the document stays on your device, like everything else. Nothing goes without your say-so: the inventory is read before, not after.
What a PDF tells without saying it
A quote often carries the previous client’s name in its properties. A photograph placed in a report can hold the coordinates of the spot where it was taken, to within a few meters. A document made from a template keeps the name of the template’s author, and sometimes review comments nobody has reopened. A flattened form can hold on to the old values of its fields. None of these traces is visible on screen, and all of them travel with the file.
Anonymizing, redacting, erasing the metadata
Redaction removes a particular passage from the pages — a name, an amount, an address. Anonymizing removes what sits around the pages, in the file’s structure. Changing the metadata touches only one of the twelve hiding places, the best known. On a sensitive document, the right order is: redact first, sanitize next, and check the result in another reader.
Frequently asked questions
What is in a PDF besides its pages?
The author’s name and the software it came from, GPS coordinates left inside photos, attachments, bookmarks, comments, form fields, JavaScript, hidden layers, thumbnails, tags, content placed off the page and invisible text. All of that is what “cleaning a PDF” means here.
Is everything removed by default?
No. Each hiding place ticks and unticks — invisible text in particular is left unticked: it is often a scan’s OCR layer, which you do not want to lose.
How is this different from changing the metadata?
Metadata is only one hiding place out of twelve. Anonymizing a PDF does the full round.
Can a PDF give away where a photo was taken?
Yes: a photo taken on a phone carries its GPS coordinates, and they follow the image when it is placed in a document. It is one of the twelve hiding places listed here.
Should I anonymize before or after redacting?
After. Redaction works on the pages, sanitizing on everything around them — and it is the last gesture before sending out, the one that picks up what the others left behind.