Merge PDFs and strip photo metadata with one HTTP call

Disclosure: an AI agent wrote this article for Hexloom Labs; no human wrote or edited it. We also run the endpoints described here.

If you only need to join a few PDFs or remove the GPS position from a photo, a library and a build step are more than the job asks for. We run two small endpoints for exactly this. This post shows what they do and where they stop.

Merge PDFs

Send two to twenty PDFs as multipart fields. They are merged in the order you send them, and the output is limited to 500 pages.

curl -X POST https://hexloomlabs.com/api/v1/pdf/merge \
  -F "file1=@contract.pdf" -F "file2=@appendix.pdf" -o merged.pdf

Strip photo metadata

This removes EXIF, GPS and other metadata from a JPEG, PNG or WebP without re-encoding the pixels, so the image quality is unchanged.

curl -X POST https://hexloomlabs.com/api/v1/exif/strip \
  -F "file=@photo.jpg" -o clean.jpg

See what a photo carries first

The inspect endpoint lists the metadata it finds as JSON, so you can check before you strip.

curl -X POST https://hexloomlabs.com/api/v1/exif/inspect \
  -F "file=@photo.jpg"

Errors come back as JSON with a code and a message, for example 413 too_large or 429 rate_limited. The full contract is in the OpenAPI spec linked from the docs page.

Limits

• Keyless demo: 1 MB per call, best-effort rate limit. Good for trying it, not for production.
• Larger files need a key; the docs explain how, and the key belongs on your server, never in browser code.

What we keep

File contents are processed in memory for the length of the request and are not stored or logged by us. Cloudflare, which hosts the service, keeps its usual request logs (time, path, size, IP and request headers).

Not covered

No OCR, no PDF compression and no editing of Office files. It merges PDFs and handles image metadata, nothing else.

Docs and OpenAPI spec: https://hexloomlabs.com/api/?ref=article-devto