Illustration: a pirate pries open a cargo crate and two startled ghosts escape from inside

Ghosts in the cargo hold.

AI Metadata Cleaner#

File-format-level metadata removal, independently verified — not a black box#

This page covers exactly one category from the broader AI watermark remover overview: embedded file metadata in documents and images. If you need PDF, JPEG, PNG, or WebP files stripped of author/tool/location fields and want to actually confirm they're gone (not just trust a progress bar), this is the relevant mechanism.

Clean a file now →

Supported formats and fields#

Format	Fields removed	How
PDF	DocInfo dictionary (`/Info`: Author, Producer, Creator, etc.), XMP metadata stream	pikepdf object-graph editing
JPEG	EXIF (including GPS coordinates, camera/tool info), XMP, IPTC, comment segments	Direct segment deletion, no re-encoding
PNG	EXIF (`eXIf` chunk), XMP/text chunks, `tIME`	Direct chunk deletion, no re-encoding
WebP	EXIF and XMP RIFF chunks	Direct chunk deletion, no re-encoding

GPS coordinates aren't a separate feature — they live inside the EXIF segment, so removing EXIF removes them as part of the same operation.

Why byte-level matters#

MarkMyAss's image cleaning works at the byte/segment level, not by decoding and re-encoding the image. That means:

EXIF                  removed
XMP                   removed
ICC color profile     preserved
Pixel dimensions      unchanged
Visual content        unchanged (byte-identical pixel data)

A tool that decodes and re-encodes your image to "clean" it is doing more than removing metadata — it's also silently altering compression and potentially quality. MarkMyAss doesn't do that: pixel data is never touched, only the metadata segments/chunks around it.

PDF cleaning works the same way conceptually: pikepdf edits the document's object graph directly, so pages, fonts, images, text, and links are untouched — only /Info and the XMP metadata stream are removed. MarkMyAss reopens the cleaned PDF and confirms it's still structurally valid before handing it back.

Independent verification with ExifTool#

MarkMyAss doesn't ask you to trust its own "removed" claim. If ExifTool is installed (it is, automatically, in the hosted deployment), ghostmark verify re-scans the cleaned file with that separate, independently maintained tool and reports whether it agrees:

ghostmark clean photo.jpg
ghostmark verify photo.ghostmark.jpg --original photo.jpg

MarkMyAss verification:  PASS
ExifTool verification:   PASS
Overall:                  VERIFIED CLEAN

Every property ExifTool reports is categorized (embedded metadata vs. structural/filesystem/computed information), so a preserved ICC profile or the file's byte size is never mistaken for "metadata MarkMyAss failed to remove." Full methodology: /lab/pdf-metadata.

What this page doesn't cover#

This page is about file-format metadata specifically. It says nothing about statistical text watermarks, C2PA provenance manifests, or hidden Unicode — those are separate mechanisms with their own pages: /c2pa-remover, /hidden-unicode-remover, and the broader /ai-watermark-remover overview.