PDF Metadata Editor, Edit or Remove PDF Properties
Edit a PDF's title, author, subject, keywords and dates, or strip them completely. Runs in your browser, the file is never uploaded.
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Every PDF carries a small block of information about itself, separate from the text on its pages: a title, an author, a subject line, a list of keywords, the name of the application it was written in, the name of the software that produced the PDF, and timestamps for when it was created and last modified. This is the document information dictionary, and it is what your operating system shows in a file's Properties panel, what a PDF reader puts in its window title bar, and what search engines and document management systems read when they index a file. This tool loads that block from a PDF you choose, lets you edit every field, and writes a new copy of the file with your values.
Frequently asked questions
Is my PDF uploaded anywhere?
What metadata does a PDF actually contain?
How do I remove all metadata from a PDF?
Does editing metadata change the pages or quality of my PDF?
Why does the file size change slightly after saving?
It says my PDF is encrypted. What now?
What is the difference between Creator and Producer?
How should I format keywords?
Will search engines use the title I set?
Does it edit XMP metadata too?
About PDF Metadata Editor, Edit or Remove PDF Properties
There are two common reasons to care. The first is presentation and findability: a report whose title field still says "Microsoft Word - untitled2.docx" looks careless in a reader's tab and sorts badly in a document library, and filling in a real title, author and keywords makes a file easier to find later, both on your own machine and by anyone searching a shared drive. The second reason is privacy. Metadata is copied along invisibly, so a PDF exported from a template can still name the original author, an internal project codename, or the licensed copy of the software used to produce it. Before publishing a document, sending a CV, or filing something publicly, it is worth checking what the file is quietly telling people. "Clear all fields" empties every entry in one click.
Using the tool is a three-step loop. Drop a PDF in or choose it from your device, and the current values appear in the form along with the page count. Edit whatever you want, add comma separated keywords, adjust the creation date, and decide whether the modification date should be stamped with the current time or left as it was. Then save, and the edited PDF downloads immediately. Only the metadata is rewritten: pages, text, images, links, form fields and layout come through untouched, because the file is rebuilt from the original objects rather than re-rendered.
All of this happens locally. The PDF is parsed and rewritten in your browser with pdf-lib, so the document never leaves your device, is never uploaded to a server, and nothing is stored after you close the tab. That is worth knowing when the file is a contract, a medical record, an invoice or anything else you would rather not hand to an online converter. Two limits are worth flagging: password-protected PDFs must be unlocked first, since an encrypted file cannot be parsed, and XMP metadata, a second and more modern metadata stream that some publishing tools also write, is left as it was rather than rewritten. For the document properties that readers and file managers actually display, the fields here are the ones that count.
The Metadata That Gave People Away
Document metadata has an unusually rich history of embarrassing its owners. In 2003 the British government published a dossier on Iraqi weapons programmes; researchers examined the Word file's revision log and found the names of the officials who had edited it and traces of text lifted from an academic paper, a discovery that became known as the "dodgy dossier" affair and turned document properties into front-page news. In 2005 an Italian court obtained a NATO report on the killing of an intelligence officer in Baghdad, published as a PDF with the sensitive passages visually blacked out; the redaction had been drawn on top of the text rather than removing it, so anyone could copy the words straight out of the file.
The pattern repeats because metadata is invisible by design. A PDF's information dictionary is copied when files are merged, survives most conversions, and is written automatically by whatever software exported the document. That is how the author of an anonymous leak has been identified from a Creator field, how the internal codename of an unannounced product has leaked in a Subject line, and how a supposedly independent report has been traced back to the company that commissioned it. Investigative journalists routinely check these fields first, precisely because so few authors think about them.
The cure has become part of professional practice. Law firms run "metadata scrubbing" on outgoing documents, and standards bodies have defined subsets of PDF for specific purposes: PDF/A for long-term archiving, which requires metadata to be present and self-describing so a file remains interpretable decades later, and PDF/X for print production. The two goals pull in opposite directions, one wanting rich metadata for posterity and the other wanting none for privacy, which is why a good editor lets you do both: fill the fields in properly when the document is meant to be found, and empty them completely when it is not.