Removing PDF Password-Protection

This is a short one, just wanted to share how to remove password-protection from PDF documents. Instead of uploading your docs to ‘online’ password-removers or downloading tools to do that, you can use this simple method.

Nothing new here, I’ve known about this technique for quite sometime. I’ve had a bunch of people ask about it so thought maybe I should do a quick post.

Please note that this method only works on PDFs that you have the password for. You need to unlock it at least once to be able to then remove the protection moving forward. 

Here are the steps:

1. Upload your PDF to Google Drive (haven’t checked on other similar platforms but I think it should work — if you happen to check, please put a comment in and share the results).
2. Open it — you need to provide the password once to open it for the first time.
3. Once the PDF doc is open, hit CMD+P or just hit the printer button at the top.

4. This action will open it up in a new tab and you can then simply hit the ‘Download’ button and save a copy of the doc without any password.

I think the main use-case for this method is to remove passwords from docs so that you don’t need to put the password in every time you want to open a doc, which I find really annoying.