METADATA: Metadata consist of information that characterizes data. Metadata are used to provide documentation for data products. In essence, metadata answer who, what, when, where, why, and how about every facet of the data that are being documented. METADATA AND PRIVACY: Metadata within a file can tell a lot about you. Cameras record data about when a picture was taken and what camera was used. Office documents like pdf or Office automatically adds author and company information to documents and spreadsheets. Maybe you don't want to disclose those informations on the web. WARNING : Mat only remove metadata from your files, it does not anonymise their content, nor it can handle watermarking, steganography, or any too custom metadata field/system. If you really want to be anonym, use format that does not contain any metadata, or better : use plain-text. DEPENDENCIES: python2.6 (at least) python-hachoir-core and python-hachoir-parser shred (should be already installed) OPTIONALS DEPENDENCIES: python-poppler and python-poppler : for pdf support python-mutagen : for massive audio format support USAGE: python cli.py --help or python gui.py SUPPORTED FORMAT: Portable Network Graphics (.png) support : full metadata : textual metadata + date method : removal of harmful fields is done with hachoir Jpeg (.jpeg, .jpg) support : full metadata : comment + exif/photoshop/adobe method : removal of harmful fields is done with hachoir Open Document (.odt, .odx, .ods, ...) support : full metadata : a meta.xml file method : removal of the meta.xml file Office Openxml (.docx, .pptx, .xlsx, ...) support : full metadata : a docProps folder containings xml metadata files method : removal of the docProps folder Portable Document Fileformat (.pdf) support : full metadata : a lot method : rendering of the pdf file on a cairo surface with the help of poppler in order to remove all the internal metadata, then removal of the remaining metadata fields of the pdf itself with pdfrw (the next version of python-cairo will support metadata, so we should get rid of pdfrw) Tape ARchive (.tar, .tar.bz2, .tar.gz) support : full metadata : metadata from the file itself, metadata from the file contained into the archive, and metadata added by tar to the file at then creation of the archive method : extraction of each file, treatement of the file, add treated file to a new archive, right before the add, remove the metadata added by tar itself. When the new archive is complete, remove all his metadata. Zip (.zip) support : .partial metadata : metadata from the file itself, metadata from the file contained into the archive, and metadata added by zip to the file when added to the archive. method : extraction of each file, treatement of the file, add treated file to a new archive. When the new archive is complete, remove all his metadata MPEG Audio (.mp3, .mp2, .mp1) support : full metadata : id3 method : removal of harmful fields is done with hachoir Ogg Vorbis (.ogg) support : full metadata : Vorbis method : removal of harmful fields is done with mutagen Free Lossless Audio Codec (.flac) support : full metadata : Flac, Vorbis method : removal of harmful fields is done with mutagen LICENSE: This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2 as published by the Free Software Foundation. This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA. THANKS: Mat would not exist without : - the Google SUmmer of Code, - the Python language - the amazing (and messy) hachoir library, - poppler and cairo's python bindings, - and the mutagen library many thanks to them ! KNOWN BUGS: Zipfiles are not totally cleaned, I know. I am working on a patch for zipfile.py