Edit metadata
Change the title, author and dates a PDF carries about itself.
This tool runs entirely in your browser. Your file is never uploaded, and you can verify that in your browser's network tab. Verify it yourself: open your browser's network tab and watch. You will see one small request asking whether you have tasks left - a tool name and a hash, never the file.
What this does
Every PDF carries a set of details about itself: a title, an author, a subject, keywords, the program that produced it and two dates. Readers show them in a properties dialog, some show the title in the window bar instead of the file name, and search tools index them. This tool reads what is in your document, lets you change any of it, and writes the result back without touching a single page.
Use it when the details are wrong or revealing: a document exported from a colleague's template that still carries their name, a report whose title is "Microsoft Word - draft3.docx", a file going outside the organisation with an internal project code in its keywords, or a scan with no details at all that you would like to be findable.
How it works
- Drop the PDF onto this page. Every box is filled in with what the document currently holds.
- Edit the boxes you care about and leave the rest alone.
- Empty a text box to remove that detail from the file entirely. An empty date box leaves the date as it is.
- Set the dates in ISO form under advanced options if they need correcting, and clear the XMP packet there if you want only the classic details left.
- Press Save metadata and the download starts.
The boxes are filled from your document before you touch them, and that is the whole design. An editor that starts empty makes you retype what is already there to change one field, and silently blanks everything you did not retype. Because the boxes are pre-filled here, an empty box can safely mean "remove this" - which is the only way a form that submits every field can express the difference between clearing a value and leaving it alone.
A PDF stores its details twice: the old Info dictionary and the newer XMP packet, and every modern reader believes the packet when the two disagree. Editing only the dictionary is the classic metadata-editor bug - Acrobat keeps showing the old title and you conclude the tool is broken. So when your document already has a packet, it is rebuilt from the details you just saved. That rebuild does discard producer-specific XMP extensions written by Illustrator or InDesign, which is a real loss and a smaller one than showing you a title you had just deleted.
Dates are ISO 8601 because a PDF date is unambiguous and a localised one is not. "03/04/2026" is two different days depending on where the reader lives, and metadata is precisely where that ambiguity outlives everyone involved. Write 2026-03-04, or 2026-03-04T09:30:00Z when the time matters. An empty date box leaves the existing date alone rather than clearing it, which is the one place where the boxes here differ from each other.
The producer field is left exactly as your document had it. This tool does not stamp its own name over whatever wrote the file, because the producer is often the one honest clue about how a document was made, and quietly rewriting it would make every file that passed through here look the same.
If what you want is nothing rather than something else, Remove metadata is the tool: it deletes the objects instead of the references, since pdf-lib writes out every object in the file whether or not anything points at it, and a packet that is merely unreferenced is still there for anyone with a hex editor.
Questions people ask
- Where does this information show up?
- In a reader's document properties dialog, in the window or tab title where a reader prefers the PDF's title over the file name, in file-manager columns, and in the index of any search tool that reads inside documents. It travels with the file, so a title you set here is what a recipient sees even after they rename the file on disk.
- How do I remove a field rather than change it?
- Empty the box and save. Because every box is filled from the document when you drop it in, an empty one is an instruction to delete that entry rather than an accident. The dates behave differently: an empty date box leaves the existing date in place, so use Remove metadata if you want the dates gone as well.
- What format do the dates need?
- ISO 8601: 2026-03-04 for a date, or 2026-03-04T09:30:00Z when the time matters. Anything the browser cannot parse as a date is rejected with a message rather than written as nonsense. The two dates are the creation date and the last-modified date, and readers show both in the properties dialog.
- What is the XMP packet and should I clear it?
- It is the modern half of a PDF's metadata, an XML block that readers trust ahead of the old Info dictionary. Leave it alone in normal use: it is rebuilt from your edits so the two halves agree. Clear it when you want only the classic fields left in the file, or when a packet from another program is carrying more history than you want to pass on. PDF/A files need their packet, so do not clear it on one.
- Does my document leave the device?
- No. The details are read from the file in your browser, edited in the page, and written back locally. Given that the usual reason for coming here is a name or a project code that should not be in the file, sending the document to a server to have that removed would be a strange way round.