Metadata is the data that provides information about the actual data. It is commonly described as “data about data“. When sending a file to someone, it is not a good practice to send metadata along. It can reveal your information to the receiver that you may not want to share. Some of the examples include; Name, Company Name, Document Modification Date, Make and Model of Camera, etc. In this article, we will be programmatically removing metadata from the images and documents using Java.
- Java Metadata Cleaner API
- Remove Metadata from Documents
- Clean Metadata from Images
- Remove Selective Metadata from Documents and Images
Java Metadata Cleaner API
GroupDocs.Metadata for Java is a metadata API for Java that supports most of the popular metadata standards like EXIF, XMP, IPTC, ID3 tag, etc. It allows Java developers to add, modify, extract, and remove metadata with various options from a large list of supported formats of documents, images, and other files.
Steps in this article and code samples use GroupDocs.Metadata API. So before you proceed, please make sure to prepare the development environment using any of the following options:
- Get the JAR file from the downloads section.
- Add the following pom.xml configuration in your Maven-based java applications
<repository> <id>GroupDocsJavaAPI</id> <name>GroupDocs Java API</name> <url>http://repository.groupdocs.com/repo/</url> </repository>
<dependency>
<groupId>com.groupdocs</groupId>
<artifactId>groupdocs-metadata</artifactId>
<version>20.11</version>
</dependency>Remove Metadata from Documents using Java
To remove all the available metadata properties without applying any filter, and to stay safe in the era of COVID-19, use the sanitize method. The following are the steps to remove metadata from the documents using GroupDocs.Metadata for Java.
- Instantiate the object of the Metadata class, passing the path of the target document as the parameter.
- Call the sanitize method. It returns the number of the removed metadata properties.
- Save the output file with cleared metadata using the save method.
The following Java code sample shows how to remove and clear metadata from the document.
Remove Metadata from Images using Java
If you want to remove all the metadata from your images using Java, you can use the same sanitize method by following the same steps:
- Create the object of the Metadata class, passing the target document path as the parameter.
- Call the sanitize method.
- Save the output file using the save method.
Remove Selective Metadata from Documents and Images using Java
It is not always required to remove all the available metadata from the files, however, we sometimes want to remove the selective metadata properties. The following steps show how to locate and remove the metadata using the specific name of the property.
- Create Metadata object to load the targeted document or image file.
- Create personalized specifications to find the metadata properties.
- Call the removeProperties method and pass the personalized specifications.
- Save the output file using the save method.
Conclusion
In this article, we learned cleaning metadata from documents and images using Java. Now you can build your own metadata cleaner java application. It can support removing metadata from word-processing documents, spreadsheets, presentations, PDF files, images, emails, eBooks, drawings, zip files, and many more. You can explore more about the Java metadata API from the documentation.
