Self-hosted metadata removal for images and PDFs
Photos carry GPS coordinates, device IDs, and timestamps. PDFs carry author names and software fingerprints. SnapOtter strips all of it on your own server, before anything gets shared.
What most teams do today
You paste a photo or PDF into an online metadata remover to clean it before publishing or sending. To strip the data, you first hand the original, metadata and all, to the tool.
Why that's a problem for sensitive files
Metadata is the leak you forget about: home GPS in a photo, a client's name in a PDF author field, the exact software and version that made a file. Uploading the original to an online scrubber to remove that data means the untouched file, with everything you wanted to hide, reaches a third party first.
How SnapOtter does it privately
SnapOtter strips EXIF and GPS from images and scrubs PDF metadata locally. Clean single files or whole batches through the UI or the REST API, with the originals never leaving your network. For documents that need more than metadata removal, the redact-pdf tool permanently removes the content itself.
Self-host in one command
Process a file over the REST API
Last reviewed July 10, 2026. Commands match the current single-container image and REST API.
Frequently asked questions
- Does it remove GPS location?
- Yes. Stripping image metadata removes EXIF including GPS coordinates, device info, and timestamps.
- Can it batch many files?
- Yes, through a pipeline or the REST API, so you can scrub whole folders in one run.
- What about redaction?
- Metadata removal strips hidden data. To remove visible content from a PDF, use the redact-pdf tool, which performs verified true redaction.
More self-hosted workflows
Deploying this across a team?
Audit trails, per-tool permissions, SSO, and air-gapped deployment for regulated environments. Talk to us about running SnapOtter as shared infrastructure.