Extract PDF metadata: web app, CLI and MCP

What it does

Extracts standard PDF metadata such as title, author, subject, keywords, creator, producer, creation date and modification date. The information is taken from the PDF file’s internal metadata fields and does not require OCR.

Inputs and limits

• Input: a single PDF file (any size).
• The web app accepts a PDF upload; the CLI version reads a PDF placed in a task‑specific input folder, and the MCP version requires a publicly reachable URL.
• No limit on the number of pages; only the metadata section of the PDF is read.

Web app

The page asks you to upload a PDF file. After upload it displays the extracted metadata fields – title, author, keywords, creation date, etc. – directly in the browser.

Open the web app: Extract metadata from a PDF.

Command line (CLI)

The Documentize.ExtractMetadata CLI plugin reads a PDF placed in a task‑specific input folder and writes a JSON file containing the metadata. Run the plugin, put the PDF in the corresponding input folder, and the result appears in the output folder as metadata.json.

# Linux / macOS (needs the .NET 10 runtime and documentize.lic next to the DLL)
export PLUGIN_INPUT_DIR=./work/input
export PLUGIN_OUTPUT_DIR=./work/output
mkdir -p "$PLUGIN_INPUT_DIR/job1"
cp sample.pdf "$PLUGIN_INPUT_DIR/job1/"
dotnet Documentize.ExtractMetadata.dll --task-id job1
ls "$PLUGIN_OUTPUT_DIR/job1"

# Windows PowerShell
$env:PLUGIN_INPUT_DIR  = "$PWD\work\input"
$env:PLUGIN_OUTPUT_DIR = "$PWD\work\output"
New-Item -ItemType Directory -Force "$env:PLUGIN_INPUT_DIR\job1" | Out-Null
Copy-Item sample.pdf "$env:PLUGIN_INPUT_DIR\job1\"
dotnet Documentize.ExtractMetadata.dll --task-id job1
Get-ChildItem "$env:PLUGIN_OUTPUT_DIR\job1"

All command line plugins: Documentize CLI plugins.

MCP

The hosted MCP tool ExtractMetadata extracts metadata from a PDF that is reachable via a public URL. Provide the URL with the fileUrl parameter; the service returns a CSV file with one row per input file, containing each metadata property.
Client configuration (the key comes from your Documentize account):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "documentize": {
      "url": "https://api.documentize.app/mcp",
      "headers": {
        "Authorization": "Bearer dmk_YOUR_KEY_HERE"
      }
    }
  }
}

Tool call (tools/call). The tool returns a task id; poll get_task_status until it reports 200, then download the file from uploadFileName:

{
  "name": "extract_metadata",
  "arguments": {
    "fileUrl": "https://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/tests/xhtml/testfiles/resources/pdf/dummy.pdf"
  }
}

About the MCP server: Documentize MCP server.

Related guides

• Extract text from PDF: web app, CLI, MCP and C#
• Extract images from PDF: web app, CLI
• Extract form data from PDF: web app, CLI, MCP and C# (FOSS)
• Parse PDF documents: web app and CLI
• Search: web app, CLI and MCP

Verified

Every code sample on this page was run on 2026-11-03 and its result was checked:

• ExtractMetadata CLI sample with content check (CLI plugin): passed in 5 s
• ExtractMetadata MCP sample with content check (hosted MCP server): passed in 6 s