How to check what your PDF is carrying

A PDF carries more than the pages you can see. Before you send one outside the building, it is worth knowing what else is in the file. Everything below works with tools you already have — none of it requires Omitly.

1. Check the document properties

The fastest check, and the one that catches the most common leak: the author and organisation fields.

• macOS (Preview): open the PDF, then Tools → Show Inspector (⌘I). The first panel shows title, author, creation and modification dates, and the software that produced the file.
• Windows (Adobe Acrobat Reader): File → Properties (Ctrl+D). The Description tab shows the same fields; Additional Metadata… shows the fuller XMP record where present.

Look for: personal names in Author, internal file paths or matter names in Title, and a modification date that contradicts the story the document tells.

2. Look for comments and annotations

Comments imported from Word reviews, sticky notes, and highlight annotations are separate objects layered over the page — easy to miss on screen, trivially extractable from the file.

• Acrobat Reader: open the Comments panel (View → Comments). If anything is listed, it travels with the file.
• Preview: View → Highlights and Notes.

A flattened-looking page can still carry the full annotation list underneath.

3. Check embedded images for EXIF

Photos and scans placed into a PDF keep their own metadata: camera model and serial number, capture timestamps, and — for phone photos — sometimes GPS coordinates. Viewers rarely surface it, but it is in the file. If a document contains photographs you didn’t take yourself, treat them as carrying their own metadata until you have confirmed otherwise.

4. Command line (for the technically inclined)

If you have Homebrew (macOS) or a package manager on Windows/Linux:

pdfinfo document.pdf        # poppler: DocInfo fields, dates, producer
exiftool document.pdf       # much fuller dump, including XMP
exiftool image.jpg          # EXIF on an extracted or source image

exiftool reads both the document-level records and, pointed at an extracted image, the EXIF block a photo carries.

5. Check what survived a redaction

Metadata is one of the places sensitive content survives a bad redaction — the others are the text layer itself. Our free redaction leak checker audits a redacted PDF in your browser and reports whether recoverable text or metadata remains. Nothing is uploaded — the check runs entirely on your machine.

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When Omitly redacts a document it scrubs the document-level metadata (DocInfo and XMP) as part of the redaction, and the sealed audit report records that the scrub happened — see what the certificate proves.