How to edit a PDF's title, author and other properties

Where this metadata actually shows up

It is more visible than people expect. The title, not the filename, is what appears in a browser tab when someone opens your PDF online, and it is what many document management systems display in a list.

It also feeds search. Google reads the title and author of a PDF when indexing it, and a document titled "Microsoft Word - final draft v3 (2).docx" ranks and reads exactly as badly as it sounds.

Editing the properties

Only the properties change. Every page, image and character of the content is left exactly as it was, and the file size barely moves.

1. 1Open the Edit metadata tool and choose your PDF.
2. 2The current values are loaded so you can see what is actually in the file.
3. 3Edit the title, author, subject and keywords — or clear them entirely.
4. 4Save and download the updated document.

The privacy problem

This is the part worth taking seriously. Metadata is written automatically by whatever produced the file, and it frequently carries information nobody intended to publish.

The author field is commonly the computer login of whoever created the document — often a real name, sometimes an employee number or an internal username. On documents produced from a template, it is frequently the name of a colleague who wrote the template years ago and has since left.

The producer field names the software and version. That is harmless in most contexts and genuinely useful to an attacker in a few, since outdated software is a documented target.

None of this is visible when you read the document. It is visible to anyone who opens the file properties, which takes two clicks.

Check the author field before publishing anything to the open web, submitting a tender, or sending a document to a counterparty. It takes ten seconds and it has embarrassed a great many organisations.

Writing a title that works

Treat the title as a headline, because in a search result that is exactly what it is. "Annual Report 2026 — Acme Industries" tells a reader what they have; "report_final_v7" does not.

Include the year or version for anything that will be superseded, and the organisation name for anything published externally. Keep it under about 60 characters so it is not truncated in search results and browser tabs.

Set the author to your organisation rather than an individual for published material. It is more useful to a reader and it avoids exposing a personal name on a public document.

Metadata after merging

This catches people out. When you merge several PDFs, the result usually inherits the properties of the first file — or has none at all — regardless of what the merged document actually contains.

So a report assembled from six sources can end up titled after its cover page, or credited to whoever made the first appendix. Setting the metadata after merging, as the last step before sending, is the reliable habit.

The same applies after splitting: each part carries the parent document's title, which is misleading when the parts go to different people.

What metadata cannot do

Editing properties does not change anything inside the document. If a name appears in the text of a page, clearing the author field does not remove it — the page content is untouched, and this is not a redaction tool.

It also does not affect the filename. A file called "draft3.pdf" with the title "Annual Report 2026" still saves as draft3.pdf; rename it in your file manager separately.

And it does not remove every trace. PDFs can carry XMP metadata, embedded thumbnails and annotation timestamps beyond the main property fields. For a document where this genuinely matters, the safest approach is to regenerate it from source rather than trusting any cleanup.

A short pre-publication checklist

1. 1Title is descriptive and would read well as a search result.
2. 2Author is your organisation, not a personal login name.
3. 3Subject and keywords are either useful or empty — not leftovers from a template.
4. 4Nothing in the fields reveals an internal project name or client you cannot name.
5. 5The filename matches the title closely enough that people can find it later.