About MetaBroom
MetaBroom is a metadata viewer and cleaner for the files people actually send: photos, PDFs and Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents. It exists because sharing a document should not mean sharing your account name, your company's template, fourteen hours of editing time or the GPS position of your kitchen — and because most of that data sits in layers no ordinary viewer shows.
The tool is built from small, inspectable parts: our own JPEG, PNG and WebP segment parsers, the exifr library for decoding EXIF and IPTC, pdf-lib for reading and rewriting PDFs, and JSZip for the Office Open XML container. All of it runs in your browser. There is no server component, no upload, no account and no analytics; after the page has loaded, MetaBroom makes no network requests at all.
It is built and maintained by Interhive OÜ, a small studio in Tallinn that makes tiny, dependable web tools.
What it does
- Lists what a file carries
EXIF, XMP and IPTC in photos; the Info dictionary, XMP and annotations in PDFs; core, app and custom properties, comments, tracked changes and people in Office files.
- Cleans images losslessly
JPEG, PNG and WebP are rebuilt from their segments with the pixel data copied unchanged. Colour profiles are kept unless you say otherwise.
- Rewrites PDFs completely
Blank Info entries, no XMP, no application data, no dates — and a fresh file structure that leaves earlier incremental saves behind.
- Refreshes Office properties
core.xml and app.xml are replaced with blanks; custom.xml, thumbnails and printer settings are removed; reviewer names, dates and rsids can be blanked too.
- Verifies the result
Every clean copy is parsed a second time. The After card shows what that read found, field by field.
- Handles batches
Any number of mixed files, cleaned one after another and delivered as a single ZIP.
What it does not do
- It does not change text, pixels, sheets or slides — names inside the content stay where they are.
- It does not open images embedded in PDFs or Office files; their EXIF is reported as a note, not removed.
- It does not read password-protected PDFs, legacy .doc/.xls/.ppt files, HEIC or RAW photos.
- It is not a redaction tool: black boxes drawn over text are content, and removing that text is a different job.
Get in touch
Found a file MetaBroom misreads, or a field it should catch? Email us — every message is read.
support@interhive.org