How to Check a PDF's Page Count and Metadata

Sometimes you need one fact about a PDF — how many pages, who created it, when — without the overhead of opening it in a full reader. A quick metadata check handles that in seconds.

Check it in your browser (no upload, free)

The PDF Info Viewer on keptlocal reads a PDF's page count and embedded metadata instantly, entirely on your device.

1. Drop your PDF onto the tool.
2. See page count, title, author, subject, creation and modification dates, and the software that created it, all at once.
3. Click Copy to grab the details as text.

What's actually stored in a PDF's metadata

Every PDF carries a document information dictionary — a small block of metadata separate from the visible page content. What's commonly present:

• Title, Author, Subject, Keywords — fields the creating software may have filled in automatically or left for the author to set manually. Word documents exported to PDF often carry over the document's saved author name and title, for instance.
• Creator and Producer — the application that created the original document (Creator) and the software that generated the actual PDF file (Producer) — sometimes the same tool, sometimes different (a document written in one application and exported to PDF by another).
• CreationDate and ModDate — timestamps for when the PDF was first generated and last modified, stored in the file's internal structure regardless of what any visible date on the page content says.

None of this is guaranteed to be filled in accurately, or at all — it depends entirely on what the software that created the PDF chose to embed. A scanned document might have essentially blank metadata; a PDF exported from a well-configured publishing tool might have everything filled in precisely.

Why this occasionally matters for privacy

Metadata can reveal information that isn't visible anywhere in the document's actual pages — an author's real name on a document meant to be shared anonymously, the name of the software (and sometimes the company) that produced it, or a creation date that doesn't match a claimed document date. Before sharing a sensitive PDF externally, a quick metadata check is worth doing alongside checking the visible content.

Privacy: what happens to your file

Reading metadata happens entirely in your browser using pdf-lib — the file is never uploaded, which is particularly relevant for a tool whose whole purpose is inspecting potentially sensitive document details.

Check a PDF's info now with keptlocal's free PDF Info Viewer — no upload, no signup.