PDF Properties

Is there a way to view PDF properties like Author, Subject, and Keywords?

I am particularly interested in keywords as shown in Preview. What I am trying to do is move from Paperless to EagleFiler. Paperless stores its metadata in the keywords field in the format:
vendor=XYZ
amount=$0.00
category=XYZ
notes=Any notes end up here.

When I import a PDF from Paperless the text as shown above is clearly embedded in the PDF because searches find the files. But I can’t find anywhere to display that metadata so that I can see the full context for the matched search result. It would be even better if EF parsed those keywords and created tags, but it would be good enough for me if I could at least see the information.

I swear I could see this information somewhere when I was running the demo, but after buying from the App Store I can’t find it at all. I was probably confused.

EagleFiler imports the PDF Author field to the EagleFiler From field. You can view it in the records list or the Info inspector. The Subject is not displayed, although I can consider supporting that in a future version. Of course, you can see all the PDF metadata if you double-click the PDF file to open it in Preview.

By default, EagleFiler does not display the PDF keywords, though it indexes them for searching. There is also the ImportSpotlightKeywords esoteric preference, which will make EagleFiler turn PDF keywords into tags when you import.

I tried turning on the ImportSpotlightKeywords pref but nothing happened. So I did a bunch of testing and discovered that normally ImportSpotlightKeywords does work as intended. It just doesn’t work for my files :-/. Unfortunately, I could not figure out exactly how the keywords in those files differed from those in successfully imported files.

The Spotlight keywords feature reads the keywords from the Spotlight database rather than the actual PDF file. So if your PDF file is in a folder that’s excluded from Spotlight indexing, or if the file cannot be read by Spotlight for whatever reason, the keywords won’t make it into EagleFiler. If there is a particular PDF file that you’d like me to investigate, you can submit it via e-mail.

I ended up emailing a sample file to Michael which, naturally imported for him without any problems. After much pulling of hair and several dead ends, I wondered why it imported for him so I did a test and emailed a file to myself. The emailed file imported with no problem. Figuring that zipping a file might allow me to send a copy of a bad file I discovered that if I compressed and then uncompressed my problematic files they could be imported to EagleFiler with their keywords successfully converted to tags.

And thanks to EagleFiler’s robust tag editing capabilities I am able to clean up the imported tags with relative ease.

I still wish I knew what Paperless is doing to corrupt those files, but if anyone else ever runs into this problem this is an easy way to fix them.