FORUM: How to REDACT documents and images of your personal information.

[Amethyst]

When uploading documents to the forum we highly recommend, nay, insist !, that you remove personal details from the document. I'll do a little guide for redacting documents for the uninitiated, I think mostly people have problems when going straight from a mobile phone/tablet.... so the simplest way is to use kitchen utensils to cover up your personal info before you take a photo ( I wouldn't go scribbling stuff out with a marker pen, cause you might need the document later for court or another reason and don't want to have permanently ruined it )

[Amethyst]

So, I've taken a photo on my phone and screenshotted it so it's not a massive file - this is normally plenty big enough to read on the forum... I've edited off my battery level bit using the crop tool on my phone ...

[Amethyst]

I'll do the more technical redacting processes in a bit

[Amethyst]

Okay, more technical process.

Video...



I want to put a document in here but it has my personal details on.....

so OPEN THE FILE IN PAINT ...

Edit it and then save it, then you can upload it...

[Amethyst]

WORD should be easy, just change the words you want to remove to XXXXXXXX

PDF is a bit trickier. I have Adobe PDF Pro now, but in the olden days I'd screenshot the page, edit it on paint, and save it as an image. Bit of a pain. However, don't be tempted just to draw black boxes over the top of a document on PDF - it leaves all your personal info in place and if you scroll up and down quickly it is perfectly visible... so either use the full Redact tool on Adobe PDF Editor or switch them to Images and edit in PAINT ( or Photoshop of course )

[AlanMcLean]

Thanks for sharing the video, it's very informative, and it's a very easy way to hide your personal information, in my opinion. However, I like to use a more traditional method and use an online platform like https://pdfliner.com/ to edit my pdf documents before I upload them to the forum. This is available for all the documents I share online and not only, but I also use it for editing my work documents as well. I've never tried this method before, but still, good to know, it may come in handy at one point.