Forum Discussion
Is there any way at all to search for PDF files using PDF keywords in SharePoint Online?
I have many PDF files in an SPO site. They have been tagged with keywords, and I’d like them to be indexed by those keywords. In the SPO Search Center I can find and filter PDF files by author and ...
SharePoint can query the properties (i.e. metadata) of a document only if there is a document parser that "promotes" such properties when uploading the document.
Unfortunately, SPO does not implement out of the box a document parser for PDF files, hence the PDF properties are not "promoted" (i.e. they are ignored).
So, if you want to query PDF properties in SPO, you have to fill by yourself, manually or automatically, the corresponding columns on the document library where the PDF is stored.
See https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/wbaer/2014/08/29/document-property-promotion-and-demotion-overview-and-considerations/
I am not sure if the pdf properties will be picked up. You should really add those properties to the pdf document at the SharePoint level. So use termsets, and document properties in SharePoint. It might be possible to create a script that reads the pdf properties and update the SharePoint properties accordingly.
Agree with Pieter, you will need to add this properties as metadata in your document libraries if you want to be able to search documents using this metadata