Free Encrypt PDF

Free Encrypt PDF is a handy and easy to understand piece of software developed to assist you in protecting your most important documents from wrongful usage, by enabling you set up a password limiting access to their contents.

The application features a fairly basic and unimpressive user interface, yet this aspect makes it simple to work with, particularly for inexperienced individuals.

The main window lets you add the Portable Document Format files that you want to work with, either individually, or in batch, by loading a whole directory at once.

Free Encrypt PDF is able to work with multiple items simultaneously, but regardless of how many you add into the program, you will need to input a ‘User Password’ and ‘Owner Password’ for each one, upon loading them into the program.

This aspect can prove beneficial, as it means that gaining access to one file does not equal access to all the PDFs, but on the other hand, it can seem like a bit of a hassle to enter them one at a time, particularly when you need to work with multiple documents.

While you are able to set two different passwords, for a ‘User’ and and ‘Owner, you cannot define the access restrictions in any way, which means you cannot decide whether copying, printing or editing are permitted.

To complete the process, you can choose a destination folder or opt to export them to the source directory, after which you can press the ‘Convert All’ or ‘Convert Selected’ to encrypt your files with the access key of your choice.

To sum it up, Free Encrypt PDF is an effective yet rather limited utility aimed to help you keep your Portable Document Format files protected against people who wish to use them wrongfully, allowing you to restrict their usage to people who know the proper password.