Why this exists

The problem it came from

Files carry far more than the thing you can see in them. A photograph records where it was taken, on what device, and often who owns that device. A Word file records who wrote it, who edited it, how long they spent, and what they deleted. A PDF frequently contains its own earlier drafts. None of this is visible when you look at the document, and almost nobody checks.

Good tools for this already exist. exiftool and mat2 are more thorough than this page will ever be, and anyone who works with files professionally should install them. But both are command-line programs, which means they are unusable for the person who simply wants to know whether the photo they are about to post shows their home address. That gap is what this was built to close.

Who made it

Built by Basit Husain, who has spent around fifteen years in software quality engineering and currently leads a quality team delivering test automation for large enterprise clients. That background is the reason this exists: the whole discipline of quality engineering is about the difference between what an artefact appears to contain and what it actually contains. A file with your home coordinates buried in it is exactly that problem, in a form that affects everybody rather than just software teams.

Every parser on this site was written by hand for it — the JPEG segment walker, the TIFF directory traversal that reads EXIF, the HEIC container reader that resolves metadata items through the file's own index, the PDF scanner, and the archive reader for Office documents. There is no third-party library sitting between you and your file, and the whole thing is one readable page you are welcome to inspect.

What it deliberately does not do

• It does not upload your files. Not to be processed, not to be scanned, not for any reason. Open your browser's network tab and watch: nothing is sent. The page continues to work with the network disconnected, which is the strongest proof available that no server is involved.
• It does not delete hidden spreadsheet sheets. They are reported clearly and left alone, because removing a sheet destroys data and that decision belongs to you.
• It does not claim to be complete. Where a PDF has been saved incrementally, its earlier versions live in the document body rather than its metadata, and cleaning cannot remove them. The tool detects this and says so instead of pretending otherwise.
• It is not a security guarantee. It removes one channel of identification. If your safety depends on anonymity, the account you send from, the network you use and the timing all matter as much as the file does.

Read the engineering notes

There is a longer piece on how this was built, including four bugs that made it into working code before testing caught them, and the decisions that look like limitations but are deliberate.

How it is paid for

Advertising, and voluntary contributions from people who found it useful. Neither has any access to your files, because nothing about them leaves your device in the first place. There is no paid tier, no account, no file size limit and nothing to sign up for — and since there is no server doing the work, there is nothing that costs money per use.