Ever downloaded a PDF where the browser tab shows some cryptic internal filename, or opened “Document Properties” in a reader and found a colleague’s name listed as the author of something you wrote? That’s all metadata — information about the file that sits separately from its actual page content, and it’s editable without touching anything visible on the pages themselves.

What’s actually in there

Most PDFs carry a handful of standard metadata fields: title, author, subject, and keywords. These show up in a reader’s “Document Properties” or “File Info” panel, and the title in particular often controls what a browser tab displays when the PDF is opened directly.

Changing it

Edit PDF Metadata loads a PDF’s existing metadata straight into an editable form:

  1. Upload your PDF — the current title, author, subject, and keywords pre-fill automatically.
  2. Edit whichever fields need changing, or clear one out entirely by leaving it blank.
  3. Download the result.

Nothing about the pages themselves changes — this only touches the invisible document properties.

Common reasons to do this

  • Removing a previous author’s name (a template file, a colleague’s draft) before you send something out under your own name.
  • Fixing a wrong or auto-generated title that shows up awkwardly in a browser tab or file preview.
  • Adding real keywords so the file is easier to find later in a search-based document archive.
  • Wiping all four fields at once before you share a file publicly. There’s no separate “strip metadata” button — you just clear title, author, subject, and keywords one at a time and download. Takes a few seconds either way.

Why this doesn’t need an upload

Metadata is often the most personally identifying part of an otherwise-anonymous PDF — a colleague’s real name sitting in the Author field, a company name an export process stamped in without asking, a leftover subject line from whatever this file used to be. That’s not something you necessarily want to type into a form on someone else’s server on the way to removing it. Edit PDF Metadata reads and rewrites those fields with pdf-lib running as ordinary JavaScript in your browser tab — the file itself never gets uploaded anywhere, so there’s no copy sitting on a server afterward for anyone to worry about.

What it doesn’t touch

  • Your operating system’s own file-creation and modification timestamps. These are separate from PDF metadata and aren’t affected here — those get set fresh whenever the new file is saved to disk, regardless of what the document properties say.
  • Producer, Creator, and the PDF’s own internal timestamps. Beyond title, author, subject, and keywords, a PDF can carry a Producer field (naming the library that generated the file) and a Creator field (naming the application you typed the document in), plus its own internal creation and modification dates. These get set by whatever software made the file in the first place, and Edit PDF Metadata doesn’t read or write any of them — it only handles the four fields readers and search engines actually surface.
  • XMP metadata and custom vendor fields. Some PDFs — especially ones out of Adobe apps — carry a second, separate metadata stream in XMP format alongside the classic fields this tool edits, sometimes duplicating the same title or author information. If an old value is sitting in that layer, it can survive even after you’ve cleared the equivalent field here. A tool that specifically exposes XMP or “Additional Metadata” (Adobe Acrobat’s full Document Properties dialog, for instance) is what reaches that layer — this one doesn’t.