PDF Metadata Viewer & Editor

View and edit a PDF's title, author, subject, and keywords.

This tool runs entirely in your browser. Your data is never uploaded, never stored, and never leaves your device.

Reads out the document properties buried inside a PDF — title, author, subject, keywords, producer, page count and the creation and modification dates — and lets you rewrite the first four.

How to use it

1Drop in the PDF; page count, producer and both dates are shown read-only, with title, author, subject and keywords in editable boxes.
2Edit whichever fields you need — keywords go in as a comma-separated list.
3Press Apply & Download to get the file back with '-updated' appended to its name.

Example

Input: invoice.pdf, Title set to Q3 Invoice and Author set to Jane Doe
Output: invoice-updated.pdf, whose properties now read Title: Q3 Invoice, Author: Jane Doe

Saving stamps a fresh modification date and rewrites the Producer string to name the PDF library used here, so those two read-only values will no longer match what you saw before saving. Clearing a box writes an empty value rather than deleting the entry.

What happens to your data

The file is parsed and rewritten in your browser with pdf-lib; nothing is uploaded. Worth knowing before you rely on it: this changes the document information entries only. It is not a redaction tool, and the text and images on the pages are untouched.

Last updated August 2026

Someone opens the PDF you sent and the window title reads Draft_v7_final_ACTUAL.docx, or the properties name a colleague who left two years ago. A PDF carries a small block of information about itself that nobody looks at until it is embarrassing — a title inherited from the Word file it came from, an author taken from whoever installed the software, keywords left behind by a template.

Work out first which of two things you want to change. The document properties are one: title, author, subject and keywords, alongside a producer string, a page count and dates written automatically by whatever last saved the file. The words printed on the pages are the other, and editing properties does not touch them. If your name sits in a footer, a signature block or an annotation, the author box is not where you remove it.

What the format will not do is check any of it. These are free-text fields with no schema behind them: nothing confirms that the title matches the heading on page one, nothing stops two unrelated files sharing an author, and no reader will warn you that the keywords describe a different document. Nor is there any history — once a file has been re-saved with new properties, the old values survive only in whatever copy you kept.

The common mistake is reading empty properties as anonymity. A blank author tells a reader nothing, but the producer string still names software, and the file name on the email is read before anything inside it. Tidying a document and hiding its origin are different jobs.

How it works

Toolvore reads and rewrites the PDF in your browser with pdf-lib, a library fetched only once you drop a file in rather than when the page loads. The read pass opens the document with metadata updating switched off, so looking at a file changes nothing in it: page count, producer and both dates come back read-only, while title, author, subject and keywords come back in boxes you can type into. Apply & Download re-reads the original bytes, writes those four values — keywords split on commas into a list — and assembles a new file in memory, which then appears as a separate download link rather than saving on its own. Where it is thin: there is no field for the creation date, the producer or the creator, and although the creator is read out of the file it is never shown to you. Dates are rendered in your own time zone and locale rather than as the file stores them. One file per pass, and an encrypted or damaged PDF is turned away with a single message rather than a diagnosis.

Common use cases

Clearing an author name inherited from whoever exported the file
Giving a report a real title so readers do not see a file path
Adding keywords before a set of PDFs goes into a document management system
Checking the page count and creation date of a file someone forwarded
Tidying the properties on a CV before sending it out
Correcting the subject on a scanned document before it is filed

Frequently asked questions

What is PDF metadata, and who ever sees it?＋

It is a small set of descriptive fields stored alongside the pages rather than on them: title, author, subject, keywords, the software involved, and dates. Most people meet it in three places. A PDF reader shows it in a document properties panel, and many readers put the title — not the file name — in the window or tab heading. Search tools on your computer and document management systems index those fields, so a well-titled file is findable and an untitled one tends not to be. And a PDF published on a website often has its title used as the heading in search results.

Why does my PDF show the wrong author name?＋

Because it was filled in for you. When a PDF is exported from Word, Pages or Google Docs, the author is taken from the account or user name configured in that application — often the person whose template you started from, or whoever set up a shared machine. Scanners write the device or driver name instead. Nothing prompts you at export time, so the same value travels with every file you produce until you change it at the source. Correcting one PDF corrects that PDF; correcting the user name in the application that exports them stops the problem recurring.

Does clearing the author make a document anonymous?＋

No, and this is the mistake worth avoiding. Document properties are one thin layer. A name can also sit in the visible text, in a header or footer, in a signature block, in comments and annotations, in an embedded attachment, and in the file name itself — which is usually the first thing a recipient sees and is not stored inside the PDF at all. Scanned pages can carry device identifiers of their own. If a document has to reach someone who must not know who wrote it, read the pages as a stranger would and rename the file as well.

Where does my file go while its properties are being changed?＋

Nowhere. The PDF is parsed and rewritten by a JavaScript library running inside the page, so the bytes stay in the tab you have open and no copy is sent anywhere to be processed. The edited version is built in memory and handed to you through a temporary link the browser creates for it, which dies with the tab — reload or close the page and both the original and the edited copy are gone, with nothing left to clean up. That matters more than usual here, because the documents whose properties people want to change tend to be contracts, applications and CVs.

I changed the title but my reader still shows the old one — why?＋

A PDF can describe itself twice. There is the document information block, which holds the plain title, author, subject and keywords entries, and there can also be an XMP packet: an XML section carrying the same ideas in a different vocabulary. Nothing forces the two to agree, and software differs on which it trusts — one viewer reads the information entries, another prefers XMP, a search index may take whichever it finds first. When an old title appears to survive an edit, that disagreement is the usual explanation. Opening the file in a second reader tells you quickly which copy you are looking at.

Why would a PDF refuse to open for editing at all?＋

Two causes account for nearly all of it. The file is encrypted — either a password needed to open it, or an owner password restricting changes, both of which stop a library reading the contents until the password is supplied, and there is no box here to supply one. Or the file is damaged: truncated by an interrupted download, or written by software that produced a structure the parser will not accept. The message you get does not separate the two cases. Opening the file in an ordinary PDF reader is the quickest test — if that complains too, it is broken rather than locked.

What is the difference between the Creator and the Producer?＋

By convention the Creator names the application the document originally came from — a word processor, a design tool, a scanner's software — while the Producer names the component that actually wrote the PDF bytes, typically a library or an export engine. A file drafted in one program and then passed through another commonly shows one of each, which is a small history of how it was made and why the two so often disagree. Only the Producer is displayed on this page, read-only; the Creator is read out of the file but never shown. Neither can be set here.

Can I change a PDF's creation date?＋

Not from this page — the creation date is shown read-only and there is no field for it. In the format itself the date is an ordinary entry that any tool with write access can set, which is worth remembering in both directions: it is not proof of when a document was made, and changing it would not hide much, since files usually carry other traces of their history. Note also that both dates here are rendered in your own time zone and locale, so a colleague elsewhere can read a different clock time from the very same file.

How do I edit the properties of a lot of PDFs at once?＋

Not by hand, past about a dozen. This page handles a single file per pass, which is fine for the occasional fix and tedious for a folder of a hundred. For bulk work the usual answer is a command line tool such as ExifTool or pdftk, driven by a short script that walks the folder and applies the same title, author or keyword set to every file. Many document management systems can also write these fields on ingest, taking the values from the catalogue record rather than the file. Work on copies, because a bulk edit is awkward to undo.