PDF/A Metadata Tagger
Add PDF/A metadata tags (not a full PDF/A conversion)
Drag & drop your file here
or click to choose
Max 50 MB · No registration needed
Your file stays on your device — never uploaded
How to tag a PDF with PDF/A metadata
- 1
Upload the PDF by dragging it into the box above or clicking to browse your files.
- 2
Click Convert. The tool adds basic PDF/A metadata (title, creator, producer, creation/modification dates) to the file.
- 3
Download the tagged PDF. Note: the output will not pass a real PDF/A validator — see below for why.
What this tool is (and isn't)
This tool adds a handful of PDF/A metadata tags. It does not perform the full PDF/A conversion pipeline: there's no XMP packet embedding, no ICC color profile embedding, and no font subsetting. As a result, the output will fail any strict PDF/A validator and will be rejected by courts, government archives, and regulated-industry submission systems. Use this tool for informal archival or when you simply want to set the producer/creator fields that casual PDF viewers display. For official PDF/A compliance, use Adobe Acrobat Pro or GhostScript — both handle the complete pipeline.
If your workflow doesn't require validator-passing PDF/A, you can still pair metadata tagging with flattening interactive elements to lock in form data and signatures, reduce the file size for emailing, or combine multiple PDFs into a single archive-ready document.
What is PDF/A, and what does real compliance require?
PDF/A is an ISO-standardized subset of the PDF format designed for digital preservation. True compliance requires all fonts to be embedded and subsetted, every color to reference an embedded ICC profile or device-independent color space, external references and JavaScript to be stripped, and an XMP metadata stream embedded in the document describing the file's conformance level. Conformance levels: PDF/A-1 (strictest, based on PDF 1.4), PDF/A-2 (adds JPEG 2000, transparency, layers), PDF/A-3 (allows arbitrary attachments). Our browser-based tool handles only the XMP-adjacent metadata tags, not the full structural work — so treat its output as a metadata-tagged PDF, not a PDF/A-compliant file.