Pdf shrink os x how to#
Pdf shrink os x pdf#
Pdf shrink os x plus#
Pdf shrink os x mac#

So now all I have to do is select File and then Compress PDF right here in the Finder and it does it for me. You can see that puts it in the first slot. I can go to the Finder here and I can move Compress PDF up to the top here.

I can also customize if I'm using this a lot. It's also easy to get to if you're here in the Finder in a regular window and you can select the file and you can see these Quick Actions here. It actually changed the file right there in place. Now if I get information on this original file you can see it's 1.1 MB. You saw briefly there was a little gear up there saying it was working. I'm going to select it and it is automatically going to apply that. One of those is to Control click on the File and then go to Quick Actions and I should see it there. Now that it's saved as a Quick Action I can access it many different ways. Now I'm going to Save this and just name it Compress PDF and save it as a Quick Action. The original one but I'm going to do the one we made. Then I'm going to choose a filter and I'm going to select the one we created. I'm going to just Not Add that make a copy. You know what? I'm not going to do that for this but you can do that if you want to save the original and then have a copy. Then it's going to say, oh this is going to change the file so do you want to do a copy. Then I'm going to search over here for quartz and you can see I've got Apply Quartz Filter to PDF document. Then I'm going to say Just in the Finder. I'm going to go and change it to Pdf file. So I'm going to set this as Workflow receives current and it says automatic. I'm going to create a Quick Action that will apply one of these filters without having to go into Preview. I'm going to add the ability to do these filters right here so I don't have to go into Preview. So next let's run Automator and I'm going to create a Quick Action in Automator. It actually looks almost just as good as the original quality. But when I look at it the quality is pretty good. So quite a significant savings over the 6.8 for the original file. Then I will go and get information on that and see that it's 1.1 MB. Then I will Save it out using another file name. I'll go to File, Export and I'm going to select Quartz Filter and instead of Reduce File Size I will look for mine that I just created, Reduce PDF File Size Better. So I'll Quit ColorSync Utility and I will open up the original PDF again. So now that should be Saved automatically. That should give us some decent compression without getting rid of quality.

I'm going to go somewhere between halfway and all the way. Then I'm going to set Image Compression to be JPEG and set the Quality to something better than this middle. Then I'm going to click here and I'm going to go to Image Effects Component and Image Compression.

Pdf shrink os x plus#

I'll hit the Plus button here and I have one called Reduce PDF File Size Better. Here you'll see the filters that you saw there when you were exporting from Preview.

Pdf shrink os x mac#

It comes with your Mac so just Search in Spotlight for ColorSync Utility and go to Filters. For that you need to use an app called ColorSync Utility. Now those quartz filters are things that you can create. So it compressed it a little bit too much. But if I look at it I can see the quality is pretty bad now. Do Command i and I'll see that it's 55KB. I'll hit Save and let's look at that file. So now when I save it out I'm going to save it with another file name. So you want to make sure you selected PDF as the Format and Quartz Filter has Reduce File Size by Default as a filter. You'll get an option here for Quartz Filter. All you need to do to compress this is go to File and then Export. So let's go and open it up in Preview by simply double clicking it. I'm going to do Command i to get information and see that it's 6.8 MB. The file size is a little bit bigger than I like. I can open it up and you can see it's just a sample electric bill. So here I've got a sample PDF on my desktop.

Pdf shrink os x how to#

I'll show you how to build something in Automator that could do it quickly and also allow you to customize the compression. However the image compression settings aren't the greatest and it takes several steps. You can simply open them up in Preview and there's a special way to export them that compresses the images inside them. You don't need anything special to be able to compress PDF files on your Mac. MacMost is brought to you thanks to a great group of supporters. Today let me show you several methods of compressing PDF files on your Mac. Check out Compress PDFs On Your Mac With Preview or an Automator Quick Action at YouTube for closed captioning and more options.