Barecopy

Remove hidden metadata from files — 100% in your browser

Productivity

Privacy

Security

Hi Product Hunt 👋 Barecopy answers one question: what does this file say about me that I didn't write? Open a Word document someone sent you and it will usually tell you their name, their company, who edited it last, how many minutes they spent on it and which template it came from. A photo can carry the GPS coordinates of the room it was taken in. That part is known. What surprised me while building this is the rest: — A cropped picture still contains what you cropped away. Drag the handles back out and it returns. Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OpenDocument all do this. — A PDF saved the normal way keeps the version before it inside the same file. The page you deleted and the number you covered with a black box are still in there as bytes. — An Excel pivot table stores its own copy of every source row. Deleting the salary tab does not delete the salaries. — Comments, attachments, signature details, printer names, SharePoint paths, links to \\fileserver\finance. Office's own Document Inspector does not look for most of that. Barecopy shows you all of it, then hands back a clean copy — and the whole thing runs in your browser. The file is never uploaded. You can load the page, go into airplane mode, and it still works; that is the easiest way to verify the claim, along with the Network tab. The libraries are self-hosted, so there are no CDN calls either. Two things I deliberately did NOT do: 1. It never deletes a redaction mark that was never applied. Removing it would hide the warning and keep the secret. It tells you instead. 2. When it can't remove something — a picture shared by two shapes, a format the browser can't re-encode — it says so rather than reporting success. A privacy tool that lies about what it removed is worse than no tool. Finding everything is free and unlimited, one file at a time. Pro (€4/mo) adds whole-folder batches, one-click removal of the hidden-content items, and a verification report: every removed field, the SHA-256 of each file before and after, and a re-scan of the clean copy confirming nothing remains — the thing you forward to a client or a court. [why you built it — one or two specific sentences, in your own words] I'd genuinely like to know: what did it find in a file you were about to send? And what format did it choke on? Both are useful to me.