FAQ
Twelve questions.
Everything is open; there is nothing to expand. If yours is not here, the contact page has an address.
The basics
- Is this really free?
- Yes. Everything on this site runs in your browser, so there is no server to pay for and nothing to charge you for. There is no account, no limit on file size or count, and no upload. Batch, the command line tool, the browser extension, the self-hosted API and team policies are free as well; nothing on this site sits behind a price or an account.
- Does it work offline?
- Yes. Once the page has loaded, disconnect and it keeps working. The sample file is the only thing fetched on demand, and only when you press "Try a sample".
- What happens to my file?
- Your browser hands the page a reference to it. The page reads the header bytes it needs, shows you what it found, and builds the clean copy from slices of the original. The file is never sent anywhere and is forgotten when you close the tab.
- How do I know nothing is uploaded?
- Open your browser's developer tools, choose the Network tab, then drop a file and clean it. No request appears. The counter beside your result reads the same data from the browser. The parsers are published as plain text at /source and the script carries a source map, and there is no server component at all.
Files and formats
- Which formats are supported?
- JPEG, PNG, Word, Excel and PowerPoint (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx) and PDF. The formats page lists exactly what is read and removed for each.
- What about video?
- Not yet. MP4, MOV and M4A carry metadata in their udta and meta atoms, and a parser for those is on the list. Drop one today and the page tells you it cannot read it; nothing is sent either way.
- Does cleaning change the picture or the text?
- No. Nothing is decoded or re-saved. The clean file is the original with the metadata parts left out, so the pixels and the document body are byte for byte what they were. The one exception is a sideways photo, where a single orientation value is written back so it still displays the right way up.
- Why is my PDF only partly cleaned?
- PDF metadata can live in an uncompressed Info dictionary and XMP packet, which FileSanity blanks in place, or inside compressed object streams, which it does not read yet. When a file has the second kind, the result says so, and you should not treat it as cleaned.
Trust
- Why not just use metacleaner?
- metacleaner and the sites like it upload your file to a server, clean it there and send it back, so you have to trust their storage, their logs and their deletion policy. FileSanity never has the file. That is not a promise; it is how the page is built.
- Do you use cookies or analytics?
- No. The site sets no cookies and loads no analytics or advertising script, which is why there is no cookie banner. The privacy policy is short because there is nothing to describe.
- Can I see the source?
- Yes. The parsers are published as plain text at /source, and the shipped script carries a source map, so the browser's developer tools show the original files rather than the minified bundle. There is no server half. Every parser is a few hundred lines written for this page, with no metadata library behind it.
- Who is behind this?
- A small company with no investors and no data business. The about page says what it is and what it will not do; the contact page has the address.
The rest is quicker to try than to ask.
Drop a file on the home page and read the table.