File metadata for online course creators
Building a course usually means assembling a pile of files from different places and times: a slide deck you've reused for years, screenshots of your own screen for a tutorial, a PDF worksheet, maybe a cover image for the course listing. Each of those files can carry information you never meant to publish alongside the lesson.
What tends to ride along
- Slide decks (PPTX) — author name, company name, total edit time, and sometimes speaker notes or reviewer comments left over from an earlier draft of the deck.
- Worksheets and handouts (PDF) — the software and author field from whatever tool generated it, plus any text layer hidden under a redaction box that was never actually removed.
- Tutorial screenshots — EXIF or basic image metadata, and whatever happened to be visible on your desktop (open tabs, file paths, a notification) when you took the shot.
- Cover and thumbnail images — device info or GPS if the image came straight from a phone camera.
None of it shows up in the finished lesson. It shows up if a student — or a platform's content scanner — opens the raw file you uploaded.
Why it's worth a pass before you publish
Most of this is low-stakes: an old company name in a slide deck's author field is forgettable. But if you've reused a deck from client work, or a worksheet still carries a reviewer's comment about a number that was wrong, that detail is now sitting inside a file thousands of students can download. The same goes for a cover photo that still has your home GPS coordinates attached — not something a course listing needs to advertise.
What scrub can check today
scrub reads files on your device — nothing uploads anywhere. For images — screenshots, cover photos, exported title slides — it shows you the metadata and cleans it directly: EXIF, GPS, XMP, and any appended data, gone losslessly.
For .pptx, .docx, and PDF course materials, scrub is scan-only today: it reads the file and shows you exactly what's inside — author info, edit history, speaker notes, comments, hidden text — so you know what to go remove yourself (Inspect Document in PowerPoint, or manually clearing the notes pane and comments) before you upload the deck. scrub doesn't yet scan or clean video files, so a recorded lesson itself isn't covered — check your recording software's export settings for a "remove metadata" option in the meantime.
The short version
Course slides, worksheets, and screenshots can carry author names, edit history, and location data that have nothing to do with the lesson. Clean the images directly, scan the decks and PDFs before you upload them, and check your video export settings separately. Get scrub free and check your course materials before you publish.