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Known Participant
September 26, 2022
Question

Acrobat Metadata - importing Description data only to keep small pdf size for uploading to website?

  • September 26, 2022
  • 2 replies
  • 2527 views

Hi folks, we need to add metadata to our pds before they are uploaded to a website. These document are exported from InDesign where we add the metadata for Document Name, Author, Keywords and just need to have this showing in the final PDF. However, before uploading to the website we have to compress these pdfs to under 1MB and doing this results in losing the metadata, so we have to go back and add it in again manually. We tried to Export the metadata from InDesign to save copying and pasting it in again manually, but the exported data is huge and makes the compressed file, back to its original file size, so this doesnt work. Is there any way (a script for example) for just exporting the little bit of data we need to add in the basic document properties only ie as above Doc title, Author, Keywords. We have hundreds of different documents that we have to add each documents metadata too manually and would love to find a quick simple way of doing this each time. I have also tried all kinds of compression methods to try and keep the metadata when compressing the pdf, but it seems the metadata is the thing that makes the pdfs so large, so I cant manage to compress them and keep the metadata. Any help would be very much appreciated. Cheers Gia

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2 replies

try67
Community Expert
Community Expert
September 27, 2022

There's no reason metadata should take that much place. It's basically a small XML file that's embedded in the PDF...

Having said that, the requirement of each PDF being less than 1MB is quite restricting, but I guess that's not something you can change.

BarlaeDC
Community Expert
Community Expert
September 27, 2022

HI,

 

Are you able to share a sample document that shows the problem, I wouldn't expect metadata to be a huge amount of a file.

 

Known Participant
September 28, 2022

Hi, thank you for your replies, but I cant share the document as its a secure financial information pdf doc. However, I am attaching a screen shot showing the size of the meta data when exported from InDesign, along with the original pdf size, compressed pdf size with Document info meta added back in manually, and compressed pdf with the data added back in by importing the exported meta from InDesign. As you can see the exported metadata file is quite huge, and there doesnt seem to be a way of just exported the few lines of Document Properties Description that we need to add back in each time. Any help would be much appreciated as this is wasting hours of our time by having to add it back in manually for each compressed pdf. Cheers Gia

try67
Community Expert
Community Expert
September 28, 2022

This is very odd. I recommend you do the following: Open the PDF file in Acrobat and then open the Content panel on the left-hand side. Right-click the top-most item and select "Audit Space Usage".

This will show you the real distribution of the objects making up the file size. Images and Fonts are usually the largest items. Maybe ID considers fonts a part of the metadata (if they are fully embedded)? That's the only way it could get to be so big, I think.