Free tool
See what a PDF says about itself.
Title, author, the software that made it, when it was created and last changed, the page count and the PDF version — for one file or a whole folder. No signup, and nothing is uploaded.
1 Choose the PDFs to inspect
2 What each document says about itself
Choose one or more PDFs, and each one’s title, author, software and dates appear here. Dates are shown in UTC, exactly as the document records them.
Your files stay on your device
The details are read in this page, using your browser’s own processing. The documents are not sent to a server, nothing is stored, and there is no account to create. Closing the tab is all the cleanup there is.
How to use it
- Drop in one PDF or a folder of them. Reading starts straight away — there is nothing to configure.
- Each document gets a card with everything it records about itself. Choosing more files adds to the list rather than replacing it.
- Copy the whole set as a table if you need it in a spreadsheet: one row per file, one column per detail.
Up to 50 files, 50 MB each. A file that cannot be read gets a card saying why and costs the others nothing — password-protected documents are the usual case.
Creator and Producer are not the same thing
These two fields confuse nearly everybody, and between them they are the most useful lines in the table.
- Creator is the program the document was written in — Word, Excel, InDesign, a scanner’s software, a browser.
- Producer is the software that wrote the actual PDF file, which is frequently a different program: a PDF printer driver, a library inside a web server, or the export engine of the application above.
A document whose Producer names a scanner or an image pipeline is a strong hint that its pages are pictures rather than text, which is exactly what decides whether Extract Text from PDF will find anything in it. The scanned-PDF guide covers what to do when it does not.
An empty field means the document does not record one
Most PDFs carry no author and no title. That is normal: the fields are optional, and plenty of software never fills them in. So a field this tool cannot find is shown as not set rather than left blank — a blank cell would look like the tool had failed to read something that is not there.
To be exact about what was read: these details come from the document information dictionary, which is where nearly every PDF keeps them. Some documents — archival PDF/A output in particular — also carry a separate XMP metadata stream, and this tool does not read that. So not set means “not in the part that was read”, which is worth knowing before concluding a file has no title at all.
Dates are shown in UTC
A PDF records its dates with a time zone attached, and showing them in yours would quietly restate the document’s own claim as a different clock time. They are shown as UTC instead, so what you read is what the file says rather than where you happen to be.
The Modified date is when the file was last written to, which is not the same as when its contents were last edited. Re-saving a document, signing it or running it through a compressor all update it.
What metadata cannot tell you
It is worth being blunt about this, because it is the reason most people look. PDF metadata is not evidence. Every field in it is plain text that any program touching the file can write, change or remove, and plenty do so routinely without being asked. A document that says it was made in 2019 by a company you recognise proves nothing at all, and an empty set of fields is not suspicious — it is the default in a lot of software.
Related guides and tools
PDF Page Counter gives you the page counts across a folder in one list, and PDF to Images turns pages into pictures. If you are working out what is actually inside a stack of documents, extracting specific fields from PDFs is the next thing to read. All the utilities are on the free PDF tools page.
Need what is inside the documents, not what they say about themselves?
Metadata tells you where a file came from. It says nothing about the supplier, the invoice number, the date or the total printed on the page — and those are usually what somebody opening forty PDFs is actually after. That is the part ExtractToExcel does: you name the columns you want, and each PDF comes back as a row in an Excel workbook. It reads scanned documents too.
Extract PDFs to Excel