How to prevent recovering metadata when using ExifTool?

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Chapters
00:00 How To Prevent Recovering Metadata When Using Exiftool?
00:29 Accepted Answer Score 15
01:03 Answer 2 Score 4
01:17 Thank you

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Full question
https://superuser.com/questions/1482619/...

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Content licensed under CC BY-SA
https://meta.stackexchange.com/help/lice...

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Tags
#privacy #metadata #exiftool

#avk47

ACCEPTED ANSWER

Score 15

The author of exiftool looked into zeroing out the data in August 2019 and has decided that against it.

It is harder than I had hoped to simply zero out the existing metadata.

The solution wouldn't be complete because there could already be unused objects containing old metadata in the original PDF, and ExifTool wouldn't be able to zero out these.

It has been advertised that ExifTool PDF edits are reversible, and some users may be relying on this feature.

See this thread on the exiftool forums.

The use of qpdf or similar programs to re-linearize after using exiftool is still how exiftool's author suggests to fully remove all metadata.

ANSWER 2

Score 4

Following the previous answer, here is what is suggested in the exiftool forum to remove PDF metadata:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
# Strip metadata and re-linearise:
exiftool -all= -overwrite_original "$1"
mv "$1" /tmp/temp.pdf
qpdf --linearize /tmp/temp.pdf "$1"