Edit or Clear the Document Properties of a PDF
Set the title, author, subject and keywords a PDF carries — or blank them out entirely.
About the PDF Metadata Editor
When a file is added, the four editable fields are filled in automatically with whatever the document already holds, so you are correcting real values rather than typing into empty boxes and hoping. Adjust any of them and save, and a new copy is written with the properties you specified.
The behaviour worth knowing is what happens to a field you leave empty: it is written as blank rather than left alone. That makes this a scrubber as much as an editor — clearing all four boxes and saving produces a copy with no title, author, subject or keywords attached to it. Used the other way, filling them in properly makes a document findable in a document management system and presentable when someone opens its properties panel. Keywords are entered as a comma-separated list and stored as separate terms. Everything happens on your own machine.
Key Features
- Existing values pre-loaded: Current properties appear in the fields when the file is added, so you edit rather than guess.
- Four properties covered: Title, author, subject and keywords are all editable in a single pass.
- Blank means cleared: Emptying a field writes an empty value, which is how you strip a property you would rather not send.
- Keywords stored properly: A comma-separated list is split into individual terms rather than saved as one long string.
- Content left untouched: Only the property block changes, so pages, text and images are byte-for-byte as they were.
How to Use the PDF Metadata Editor
- Add the PDF and wait for the fields to populate with its current values.
- Edit the title, author, subject and keywords as needed.
- Clear any field completely if you want that property removed.
- Save, and download the updated copy.
How It Works
The document is opened with pdf-lib, the four properties are written to the values in the fields, keywords are split on commas and trimmed into a list, and the modification date is set to the current time before the file is saved. Because only the information dictionary is rewritten, page content is not re-encoded and quality is unaffected. Two boundaries are worth noting. The creator and producer entries are not exposed for editing, so a file will still name the software that generated it. And the modification timestamp is always refreshed on save, so a document processed here will show as modified today regardless of which fields you actually changed.
When You Need It
A marketing team publishing a whitepaper wants the document to present properly: a real title rather than a filename, the organisation as author, and keywords that make it findable once it is sitting in a client's document system. The draft currently carries an individual's name and an internal working title inherited from the template. Setting the public values and clearing the internal ones takes one pass. The unpublished paper is under embargo until launch, so editing its properties through an online service would put the whole document on a third party's disk to change four short strings. Agencies white-labelling deliverables and archivists standardising a collection edit properties similarly.