PDF Metadata Editor: Edit or Strip Every Hidden Field

You are about to send the proposal, you hover the file to double check the name, and the little tooltip shows an Author you were not expecting: your old employer, or a client from two jobs ago, or your full legal name sitting on a document you meant to file without one.

That name did not come from anywhere obvious. Word, Pages, InDesign and every other export button stamp your account details into the PDF while it is being written, and nothing in the reading experience ever shows it. It just travels with the file to whoever opens it next.

This tool opens the document, lists every field it is actually carrying, and lets you correct or empty any of them. A PDF can also hold that same information in two separate places and most free metadata removers only clean one of them, so this one reads both and shows you what it found, and your original file is never touched.

1. Add your PDFs. Click the box, drag them in, or paste one you copied, one file or forty. Everything inside appears immediately, with no processing step to sit through.
2. Read what is really in there. The summary counts the filled-in fields across all your files, plus any extra keys the original app slipped in and any hidden second copy.
3. Edit or empty the fields. Change the title so search results stop showing "Microsoft Word - draft_final_v3.docx". Blank the author. Leave a date box empty and that timestamp comes out of the file completely rather than being set to a placeholder.
4. Clean the lot in one click. "Clear every field, every file" empties everything on every loaded document, hidden copy included.
5. Or push one set of details across the batch. Fill in the author, subject and keywords once, then copy them onto every other file. Anything you left blank stays as it was.
6. Download. A single file saves as a PDF. Several save as a zip with the original filenames kept, so you can drop them straight back where they came from.

Open a PDF's document properties in Acrobat and you get a tidy list: title, author, subject, keywords, the app that made it, two dates. Clear those, save, and it feels finished.

Plenty of files carry a second block as well. It lives in a different part of the document and is written in a different format, most editors never look at it. It usually holds the same title and author all over again. Acrobat calls it "Additional Metadata" and the technical name is XMP. Word, InDesign, Acrobat itself and most professional export tools write one without asking you.

So people clear the author, save, reopen the file somewhere else, and watch the old name turn up again. Their editor only touched the visible list. Windows Explorer, macOS Spotlight, Google's indexer and plenty of PDF readers prefer that second block when the two disagree, so the value you thought you deleted is the one everybody sees.

This tool reads both. When a file is carrying the hidden block it says so, prints out whatever it can pull from it, and ticks the box to remove it when you save. Untick that if you know the file genuinely needs it, though a signed archival document is about the only common reason.

There is one more hiding spot. The properties list is not limited to the eight standard fields, and authoring apps drop their own in freely. Word adds a Company name pulled from your Office install and a SourceModified timestamp. Other editors skip past those because they only ever ask for the standard eight. This one shows them to you, and empties them out along with everything else when you clear the file.

Batch is the point where the free web editors want money. You get a couple of jobs an hour, one file at a time, and the rest sits behind a subscription. It is also where the work drags most, because standardising forty generated invoices means opening forty files and typing the same author into each one.

Load them all in here instead. Pick any file from the list, set the fields how you want them, then copy that across. Blank fields are skipped, so a shared author and producer land on every document while each one keeps its own title. Download once and you get a zip with the original filenames intact.

Privacy counts for more with a batch than with one file. Forty documents is forty uploads to somebody else's server, and those tend to be exactly the ones you would rather not hand over: invoices, statements, client work, half-finished drafts. None of that happens here, because the reading and the rewriting both run on your own machine.