Anonymizer

The anonymizer is used to clear metadata information from a PDF, thereby hiding document information including which tool was used to make the document, or its components, as well as other critical information about the file, including its creation date.

Anonymizer screenshot

PDF files contain more than one place where metadata information can be stored. The tool provides the option to select, at a granular level, which metadata objects to clear.

The Info Dictionary and Document XMP are equivalent and contain the standard, and custom, document metadata information fields. They are separated because PDF files store this information in separate places. The Info Dictionary comes from the beginning of PDF documents standard while the Document XMP (Extensible Metadata Platform) is a new type of object, created by Adobe, that allows the file metadata scanning by tools that not know the internal file structure needed to discover the old version Info Dictionary. This type of metadata object can be embedded in almost any file type, and this is the goal of this standard.

The Components XMP corresponds to XMP metadata that can be attached to any PDF component, as Images, Vector graphics, etc., and normally contains information from the tool used to create or manipulate that component.

Command line interface:

Function name: Anonymize
Options: [] means optional parameter
[-docinfo] - To clear Info Dictionary metadata object.
[-docxmp] - To clear Document XMP metadata object.
[-compxmp] - To clear Components XMP metadata objects
[-KeepTimestamps] - keep source timestamps (created, last modified) unchanged.
[-s] - Silent mode. Run without showing the interface (only available for licensed users)
fileslist - List of PDF to anonymize; Separate files using the semicolon";" char. Must be the last parameter
 
Example:
"c:\Program Files\PDF-ShellTools\PDFShellTools.exe" Anonymize -docinfo -compxmp -s *.PDF

 

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