Rename PDF Files by Title is a free batch PDF renamer that gives every PDF a name taken from the title written inside it. You drop a folder worth of files with names like document001.pdf, scan_872.pdf or download (3).pdf, and the tool suggests names such as Attention Is All You Need.pdf. Nothing is renamed until you have seen the list: every suggestion shows where it came from and how sure the tool is, and you can edit, swap or skip any of them before you download. The title is read from two places. The first is the Title field in the PDF properties, the text your PDF reader shows in its title bar. It is often empty or wrong, for example Microsoft Word - final_v3.docx or untitled, so the tool throws such values away. The second is the first page: the largest text in the top part of the page is almost always the title of an article, report, thesis or book, and titles that run over two or three lines are joined back together. When both places agree, the confidence is high. When only one is found, it is medium, and when the page has no clear heading, it is low and the file keeps its old name unless you tick it. The result comes as a ZIP with the same PDFs under their new names, byte for byte unchanged. For a large library you can instead copy a short Windows PowerShell or Mac and Linux script that renames the originals where they are. Everything runs in your browser, so research papers, contracts and bank statements are never uploaded. To pull the text out of a PDF use PDF to Text, and to combine renamed files into one document use PDF Merger.
Most PDF folders fill up with meaningless names because the name comes from wherever the file was saved, not from what it contains. Journal sites hand out names like 1-s2.0-S0950705120302318-main.pdf, scanners count up from scan_0001, email attachments arrive as document.pdf, and every browser download of the same link adds (1), (2) and (3). Search and sorting in File Explorer or Finder only work with the name, so a library of a few hundred papers becomes hard to use. A PDF keeps its title in two places, and neither is reliable on its own. The Title property is set by the program that made the file. Word copies the title from its own document properties, which most people never fill in, so the field is empty or holds the original Word file name. LaTeX papers often have the right title, journal templates sometimes have the template name. The first page is usually right, because the title is printed there in the largest font, but a journal name, a running header or the word Abstract can be just as big. The tool skips lines that look like headers, DOIs, dates, web addresses and labels such as Research Article, takes the largest remaining text in the top 70 percent of the page, and compares it with the Title property. A good file name for papers starts with what you will search for. Author Year - Title, for example Vaswani et al 2017 - Attention Is All You Need.pdf, sorts papers by author the way a reference list does, and Year - Title sorts reports by date. The year is taken from the date stored in the PDF, which for downloaded articles is usually the year of publication but can be the year the file was made, so check it on older papers. Names are cut at 100 characters by default on a word boundary, because Windows struggles with paths longer than 260 characters and many sync services have similar limits. The new names are made safe for every system. Colons become a dash, slashes and characters such as ? * " < > | are removed, names Windows reserves such as CON or AUX get an underscore, and when two files end up with the same name the second one gets (2), compared without regard to capital letters because Windows and macOS treat Report.pdf and report.pdf as the same file. If you need one file per chapter before renaming, split it with PDF Splitter, and to check how long each document is, use PDF Page Count Checker.