Change the title, author and keywords a PDF reports

These are the fields a reader shows under Document properties, and the ones a search engine, a document management system and a court’s filing portal read to work out what your file is. They are also the fields that quietly carry the name of whoever wrote the template, long after the text has been rewritten. Fill in what should change and leave the rest empty: an empty box means leave that field alone, so correcting a title does not blank the author.

It changes what the document says about itself, not what it says. Nothing on any page moves.

Edit PDF metadata

No account. Your upload is deleted after 2 hours, the result after 24 hours.

How it works

  1. Look at what the file says now. Your reader shows it under Document properties. The PDF inspector here reads the same fields without uploading anything, which is the quicker way to check a file you are not sure about.
  2. Fill in only the fields that should change. Every box left empty keeps whatever is already in the file. Tick ‘clear everything first’ when the point is to strip the document rather than correct it.
  3. Open the result and check the properties again. The title is also what a reader puts in its window and its tab, so it is the field most worth getting right. If a search engine has indexed the file, that is the string it will print.

What the options do

The form above lists the options this tool is running today, straight from the server. This is what they are for.

Title
What the document is called, as distinct from what the file is called. A reader shows it in the title bar and a search engine prints it instead of the file name, which is why ‘Microsoft Word - draft3.docx’ is worth twenty seconds of anybody’s time. To set the file name and the title together, use rename instead.
Author
The person or organisation the document is from. This is the field most often worth clearing before something leaves the building, because it is filled in automatically from whoever’s copy of the word processor made the file.
Subject
One line about what the document is about. Filing systems index it, almost nobody fills it in, and if you are cataloguing a set of files it is the most useful box on this form.
Keywords
Words to find the file by, separated by commas. Useful inside a system that searches metadata; ignored by most readers, and not a ranking signal anywhere on the open web, so there is no point stuffing it.
Created with
The program the document was written in — ‘Microsoft Word’, for instance. Usually left alone, and worth clearing when your tool chain says more about your organisation than you would like it to.
Produced by
The program that turned the document into a PDF. Same reasoning as the field above: harmless most of the time, occasionally a fingerprint that identifies a department or a supplier.
Clear everything first
Wipes every field, including the created and modified dates and anything else stored in there, before applying whatever you typed above. Tick it and leave the boxes empty for a document that says nothing about itself. This is metadata hygiene rather than redaction: it does not touch a word of the page content.

What this tool does not do

  • It changes what the document says about itself, not what it says. Nothing on any page moves.
  • It is not redaction and not anonymisation. Names in the text, in comments, in attachments and in the images stay exactly where they are.
  • It cannot bring back a value you cleared. Work on a copy if the old metadata might matter.
  • There is no box for setting a date. ‘Clear everything first’ removes the creation and modification dates; it cannot set them to a date of your choosing.
  • Where the file carried a second copy of these fields in an XMP block, that block is removed so nothing contradicts what you just set. Any other XMP a publisher put there goes with it.
  • The file is written out again, so a digital signature will no longer verify.

What happens to your file

The file is uploaded because Edit PDF metadata runs on our server rather than in the browser tab. It is kept for at most 2 hours and the result you download for 24 hours, then a scheduled job deletes both — a job has to be able to read the file while it runs, and you have to be able to retry a failed conversion without re-uploading. Neither needs longer.

Nothing about the contents is logged, and no one reads your documents. The retention page lists the same numbers the code enforces, and the privacy policy says who can reach the storage they sit in.

Questions

Why does my PDF show a strange title in the browser tab?
Because the title field holds something like ‘Microsoft Word - draft3’, and readers prefer the title to the file name. Set the title here and it changes everywhere the field is used, including in search results.
Does clearing the metadata make the document anonymous?
No. It removes what the file says about itself — author, producer, dates — and leaves every name in the text, in the comments and in any attachment exactly where it was. It is a useful step, not a guarantee.
I set a title and my reader still shows the old one.
Some readers cache document properties and some show the file name when the window is narrow. Close and reopen the file first. If it persists, the file probably carried an XMP block with the old value — the tool removes that when it finds one, and the run notes say when it did.
What is the difference between this and rename?
Rename changes the name of the file and, if you let it, sets the title to match. This changes the fields inside the document and never touches the file name. Use rename when the file name is the problem and this when the properties are.
Will editing metadata change how the document looks?
Not at all — the pages are untouched. The file is written out again, so the byte count moves slightly and a digital signature stops verifying, but nothing on the page changes.