Does a PDF include metadata about when it was originally created and the duration of edits?

Forum|Forum|3 years ago
December 10, 2022
1 reply
5145 views

I am in a dispute with a freelancer who is trying to pass copied information off as his own and charge me a hefty sum for it. I'm wondering if there's any way I can access the metadata in the PDF he's sent me and show that what he's telling me is false.

I do see things like "Modify Date" and "Create Date" and "Metadata Date" but also things like "File Modification Date/Time" and "File Access Date/Time" and "File Inode Date/Time."

I'm trying to get information about the document's creation and duration of work...versus information about my own downloaded COPY of that document.

Any help with this would be fantastic. Thank you!

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try67

Community Expert

You can only get information about when the document was created and when it was edited. There's no information about the "duration of edit", whatever that means. Oh, and there's also no guarantee this information is accurate. It's trivial to change it any value you want, so you can't rely on it for proving anything.

thes4755864Author

Inspiring

Thank you. But can you be more specific: If someone has created a document on Oct 10, 2022, edited until Oct 20, 2022, and then uploaded that document on Oct 30, 2022...will I, when I download that same document on Nov 1, 2022, see anything with October? Or will the "creation" date be Nov 1, 2022 because that's when it "began" on my computer?

Yes, I know metadata can be edited, certainly won't rely on it as the sole piece of into. But I'd like to know which fields mean what and it's hard to tell. I see a "Create Date: 2022:XX:YY 17:17:41+5:00" -- does that mean thats when Adobe thinks the file was created, five hours before that time UMT?

thes4755864Author

Inspiring

Uploading and downloading the file should not affect its (internal) dates of creation and modification, so in theory you should still be able to figure out the original dates. However, it will affect those dates at the file-system level. When you download the file is when it is created on your system, so that would be the creation date if you check the file properties (which is not the same as the PDF metadata).

Thank you for the info, yes, makes sense. Using the computer's "Properties" or "Sort By" and so on, it will be different. But if I'm using Exiftool to view the actual PDF metadata, those dates of "creation" etc will be untouched. Yes, still possible that they're not accurate, but in theory that's how it would work. Thank you!

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