View PDF metadata with ExifTool and pdfinfo

A couple of tools you can use to look into the metadata of a PDF are Exiftool and pdfinfo, a tool that is part of Poppler's utilites.

Using exiftool

Exiftool can be used to view the metadata on digital files, including PDF, JPEG and many more. It mostly displays information about the file's creation, and with PDf sometimes the

• Title
• Author
• Keywords
• Creation date

By running

exiftool filename.pdf

it will print metadata to the terminal, which may look like this, including warnings:

ExifTool Version Number         : 12.30
File Name                       : Christina Sharpe_In the Wake_ On Blackness and Being.pdf
Directory                       : .
File Size                       : 3.1 MiB
File Modification Date/Time     : 2021:10:02 10:07:43+02:00
File Access Date/Time           : 2021:10:04 16:15:44+02:00
File Inode Change Date/Time     : 2021:10:02 10:07:45+02:00
File Permissions                : -rw-r--r--
File Type                       : PDF
File Type Extension             : pdf
MIME Type                       : application/pdf
PDF Version                     : 1.4
Linearized                      : No
Warning                         : Invalid xref table

Using pdfinfo

First, install Poppler.

On Mac:

brew install poppler

On Linux:

apt install poppler

For help, see the manual by running

pdfinfo --help

pdfinfo allows you to see metadata of the file, by running

pdfinfo filename.pdf

It will then print something like this to the terminal:

Producer:        Adobe Acrobat 9.0 Paper Capture Plug-in with ClearScan
CreationDate:    Fri Sep  4 16:29:41 2009 CEST
ModDate:         Sat Feb 23 16:41:07 2019 CET
Custom Metadata: no
Metadata Stream: yes
Tagged:          no
UserProperties:  no
Suspects:        no
Form:            AcroForm
JavaScript:      no
Pages:           11
Encrypted:       no
Page size:       468 x 640.8 pts
Page rot:        0
File size:       246950 bytes
Optimized:       yes
PDF version:     1.6

pdfinfo also has ability to print document level metadata with the -meta option.

pdfinfo filename.pdf -meta

<?xpacket begin="" id="W5M0MpCehiHzreSzNTczkc9d"?>
<x:xmpmeta xmlns:x="adobe:ns:meta/" x:xmptk="Adobe XMP Core 4.2.1-c043 52.372728, 2009/01/18-15:08:04        ">
   <rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#">
      <rdf:Description rdf:about=""
            xmlns:pdf="http://ns.adobe.com/pdf/1.3/">
         <pdf:Producer>Acrobat Distiller 7.0 (Windows)</pdf:Producer>
      </rdf:Description>
      <rdf:Description rdf:about=""
            xmlns:pdfx="http://ns.adobe.com/pdfx/1.3/">
         <pdfx:GTS_PDFXVersion>PDF/X-4</pdfx:GTS_PDFXVersion>
      </rdf:Description>
      <rdf:Description rdf:about=""
            xmlns:xmp="http://ns.adobe.com/xap/1.0/">
         <xmp:CreateDate>2016-09-24T20:10:06+05:30</xmp:CreateDate>
         <xmp:ModifyDate>2016-10-11T16:54:29-05:00</xmp:ModifyDate>
         <xmp:MetadataDate>2016-10-11T16:54:29-05:00</xmp:MetadataDate>
         <xmp:CreatorTool>Adobe Acrobat 7.0</xmp:CreatorTool>
      </rdf:Description>
      <rdf:Description rdf:about=""
            xmlns:xmpMM="http://ns.adobe.com/xap/1.0/mm/"
            xmlns:stRef="http://ns.adobe.com/xap/1.0/sType/ResourceRef#">
         <xmpMM:DocumentID>uuid:3B0E29BD6482E611B55AC7698D1090EA</xmpMM:DocumentID>
         <xmpMM:InstanceID>uuid:07134e91-ad54-41ed-8ab9-8b527a9cf01e</xmpMM:InstanceID>
         <xmpMM:DerivedFrom rdf:parseType="Resource">
            <stRef:instanceID>uuid:4a759112-a125-48bd-afb5-266418c75c7f</stRef:instanceID>
            <stRef:documentID>xmp.id:CF2F1D650479E61193ABF2273C4D4837</stRef:documentID>
            <stRef:versionID>1</stRef:versionID>
            <stRef:renditionClass>proof:pdf</stRef:renditionClass>
         </xmpMM:DerivedFrom>
      </rdf:Description>
      <rdf:Description rdf:about=""
            xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/">
         <dc:format>application/pdf</dc:format>
         <dc:title>
            <rdf:Alt>
               <rdf:li xml:lang="x-default">In the Wake: On Blackness and Being</rdf:li>
            </rdf:Alt>
         </dc:title>
         <dc:creator>
            <rdf:Bag>
               <rdf:li>Christina Sharpe</rdf:li>
            </rdf:Bag>
         </dc:creator>
      </rdf:Description>
      <rdf:Description rdf:about=""
            xmlns:pdfxid="http://www.npes.org/pdfx/ns/id/">
         <pdfxid:GTS_PDFXVersion>PDF/X-4</pdfxid:GTS_PDFXVersion>
      </rdf:Description>
   </rdf:RDF>
</x:xmpmeta>