View & Edit PDF Metadata

Every PDF carries a small block of document information — title, author, keywords, the software that produced it — and most people never look at it. It travels with the file, it is trivially readable, and it is a routine source of accidental disclosure. The tool above lets you read it, edit it or strip it, without uploading the document.

How it works

Choose a PDF. The tool reads its document information dictionary and shows six editable fields — Title, Author, Subject, Keywords, Creator and Producer — plus the creation and modification timestamps.

Reading is genuinely read-only. The underlying library stamps a new Producer and modification date by default when it opens a document; that behaviour is explicitly disabled here, so inspecting a file never alters it. You only get a modified document if you ask for one.

From there:

• Save writes your edited values back and sets the modification date to now.
• Strip clears all six fields and resets both timestamps to the Unix epoch, which is the closest a PDF gets to "no date recorded".

Either action produces a new file to download; your original is untouched on disk. Everything happens in your browser — the document is never uploaded, which is the whole point for a tool whose job is handling information you would rather not share.

One behaviour to know: keywords are stored space-separated. The PDF format keeps them as a single string, and the library joins them with spaces, so commas you type are treated as a convenient separator rather than preserved punctuation. A multi-word keyword phrase will come back as separate words.

Why the metadata matters

Author and Creator leak names. The Author field is usually populated from the operating system account or the application licence, so a CV, a tender response or a legal filing frequently ships with a real name, and sometimes an employer's. Before sending a document outside your organisation, look — it costs five seconds.

Producer identifies your toolchain. It records the exact library and version that wrote the file. That is useful for debugging and unhelpful in a security assessment, since it advertises software whose known issues are a search away.

Timestamps reveal working patterns. Creation and modification dates have been used to establish when a document was really written, which matters more often than people expect.

Title is what viewers and search engines display. Many PDF readers show the Title field in the window title bar rather than the filename, and search engines prefer it for the result heading. A document whose Title is Microsoft Word - final_v3_REALLY_final.docx — the default when a Word file is exported without one — looks exactly as careless as it sounds. Setting a real Title is the highest-value edit this tool makes.

What it does not remove

This is important, and is where the honest limits of the tool are. Stripping the document information dictionary does not sanitise the file:

• XMP metadata, a separate embedded XML block, is not cleared.
• Embedded image EXIF data, including GPS coordinates from a photograph placed in the document, remains.
• Text hidden under redaction boxes is still extractable — a drawn black rectangle covers nothing. Real redaction removes the text.
• Annotations, comments, form values and revision history are unaffected.

For a document that genuinely must be clean, use a dedicated sanitiser or export to a flattened image-only PDF and accept the loss of selectable text. Treat this tool as a way to fix the fields you can see, not as a guarantee about the ones you cannot.

Where it fits

Metadata is one instance of a general rule: files carry more than their visible contents, and data leaves organisations through channels nobody classified as a channel. Information security fundamentals covers data classification and handling; OWASP Top 10 covers the exposure categories that document leakage belongs to.

Related tools

For structural operations on the same files, use merge PDF, split PDF and compress PDF — all of which also run entirely in your browser.