PDF Metadata Viewer — Free & Online

Why check PDF metadata?

The fields that travel with your document whether you meant them to or not.

How to view PDF metadata

Three steps and a few seconds.

1. 1

   Drop your PDF

   Drag and drop the file or browse your device. Any size.

2. 2

   Properties are read locally

   The document dictionary is parsed in your browser — the file is never transmitted.

3. 3

   Review every field

   All available metadata is listed, including fields most viewers do not display.

Working with the contents instead? Extract the text, convert PDF to Markdown, or turn pages into images.

What is stored inside a PDF, and by whom

Every PDF carries a document information dictionary — a small set of fields written by whatever software produced the file. Title, Author, Subject, Keywords, Creator (the application the content was authored in), Producer (the component that wrote the PDF), and the creation and modification timestamps. Newer files may also carry an XMP metadata block holding a richer version of the same thing.

Almost none of it is typed deliberately. The Author field is usually populated from the operating system account name or the software licence. The Creator field names the application, which tells a reader what your organisation runs. The timestamps record when the file was made and last altered, to the second, usually with a timezone offset.

The Document ID is a pair of identifiers embedded when the file is created. The first stays constant across revisions of the same document while the second changes on each save, which makes it possible to establish that two files are versions of one another even if their names and contents differ.

What metadata gives away

The everyday leak is a name. A PDF sent from a company to an outside party carries the author's account name, which is often firstname.lastname, and sometimes an internal username. A file prepared under a pseudonym frequently is not, once the properties are read.

The next is the software inventory. Producer and Creator strings name the exact application and version used, which tells anyone who looks what your document pipeline is — and, if the version is old, which known issues it still has.

Then the timeline. Creation and modification timestamps have contradicted plenty of claims about when a document was prepared. Because they are written automatically, they are rarely adjusted to match a story, and a modification date after a stated deadline is difficult to explain away.

None of this is exotic — every one of these fields is readable by anyone who receives the file, using a tool like this one in a few seconds. Checking your own outgoing documents is simply the other half of that.

This viewer is read-only

The tool displays metadata; it does not change it. Removing metadata means rewriting the document dictionary, and doing that in a browser would risk producing a subtly corrupted PDF from a file you may only have one copy of.

To strip fields, use a PDF editor with a sanitise or "remove hidden information" function, or export a fresh PDF from the source document with metadata disabled. Then bring the result back here and confirm the fields are actually gone — some tools clear the visible dictionary while leaving the XMP block intact, which reads as clean in the application that produced it and not at all clean to anyone who looks properly. Because there is no server round trip, the tools keep working with the network disconnected. Load the page, turn off Wi-Fi, and the conversion still runs — which is the most direct proof available that nothing is being uploaded.

Frequently asked questions