Metadata in Podcast Transcripts and Show Notes
Podcasters publish more than audio. Show notes, episode summaries, and especially transcripts get exported as images, PDFs, or Word docs and posted alongside the episode, emailed to guests for review, or handed to a VA for formatting. Those files carry hidden metadata of their own — separate from anything in the audio.
What rides along
If a transcript or show-note graphic started life as a screenshot or an exported image, it can carry the same kind of hidden data as any photo: device model, software used, and sometimes GPS if it was captured on a phone. A cover-art image or a quote-card screenshot shared on social media is the most common case — it's an image file, and image files carry EXIF, XMP, and sometimes appended data whether anyone meant to include it or not.
If instead the transcript or notes are exported as a PDF or Word document — which is common when a transcription service hands back a formatted file — the hidden fields are different: author name, the software that generated it, edit history, and sometimes comments left by an editor who reviewed it before publish. That's useful information to know is there before a document goes out to a guest, a publicist, or the public.
Where this actually bites
- Guest privacy — a transcript doc's metadata can name an editor or assistant who was never meant to be public.
- Quote cards and clip images — the small promotional images cut for social media are plain image files and can carry GPS if they were captured or edited on a phone.
- Review drafts gone public — a reviewer's name and comment history in a Word doc can leak if the "final" file was never actually cleaned, just saved over.
What to check before you publish
For the image side — cover art, quote cards, episode thumbnails — scrub reads the file on your device, shows you exactly what EXIF, XMP, or appended data is inside, and removes it losslessly before you post it anywhere. Nothing uploads to a server to do this.
For the document side — exported transcripts or show notes saved as PDF or Word — scrub currently scans and tells you what's hidden inside (author fields, edit history, embedded comments) so you know before you send. Removing those fields from PDFs and Office documents isn't available yet; today scrub's cleaning covers image and text files. If a transcript doc needs its metadata stripped, do that in the export settings of the tool that produced it, or re-save through a fresh "export as PDF" pass with personal fields cleared first.
Related: see what EXIF data actually is and checking PDFs and Word files for hidden data.
The short version
Show-note images and quote cards are regular image files — scrub cleans those fully, locally. Exported transcripts and notes as PDF or Word are scan-only for now; check what's inside before you send them. Get scrub free and look before you publish.