Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you several methods of compressing
PDF files on your Mac. MacMost is brought to you thanks to a great
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You don't need anything special to be able to compress PDF files on your Mac. You can
simply open them up in Preview and there's a special way to export them that compresses
the images inside them. However the image compression settings aren't the greatest and
it takes several steps. I'll show you how to build something in Automator that could
do it quickly and also allow you to customize the compression.
So here I've got a sample PDF on my desktop. I can open it up and you can see it's just
a sample electric bill. I scanned it in using my iPhone. The file size is a little bit bigger
than I like. I'm going to do Command i to get information and see that it's 6.8 MB.
It can definitely be smaller. So let's go and open it up in Preview by simply double
clicking it. All you need to do to compress this is go to File and then Export. Not export
as PDF. Not Save but Export. You'll get an option here for Quartz Filter. So you want
to make sure you selected PDF as the Format and Quartz Filter has Reduce File Size by
Default as a filter.
So now when I save it out I'm going to save it with another file name. I'll hit Save and
let's look at that file. Do Command i and I'll see that it's 55KB. That's quite a size
reduction. But if I look at it I can see the quality is pretty bad now. So it compressed
it a little bit too much. Now those quartz filters are things that you can create. For
that you need to use an app called ColorSync Utility. It comes with your Mac so just Search
in Spotlight for ColorSync Utility and go to Filters. Here you'll see the filters that
you saw there when you were exporting from Preview.
So let's add our own. I'll hit the Plus button here and I have one called Reduce PDF File
Size Better. Then I'm going to click here and I'm going to go to Image Effects Component
and Image Compression. Then I'm going to set Image Compression to be JPEG and set the Quality
to something better than this middle. I'm going to go somewhere between halfway and
all the way. So about ¾, about 75%. That should give us some decent compression without
getting rid of quality. So now that should be Saved automatically. So I'll Quit ColorSync
Utility and I will open up the original PDF again. 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. Then I will Save it out using another file name.
So a third version of the file.
Then I will go and get information on that and see that it's 1.1 MB. So quite a significant
savings over the 6.8 for the original file. But when I look at it the quality is pretty
good. It actually looks almost just as good as the original quality.
So next let's run Automator and I'm going to create a Quick Action in Automator. I'm
going to add the ability to do these filters right here so I don't have to go into Preview.
I'm going to create a Quick Action that will apply one of these filters without having
to go into Preview. So I'm going to set this as Workflow receives current and it says automatic.
I'm going to go and change it to Pdf file. Then I'm going to say Just in the Finder.
Then I'm going to search over here for quartz and you can see I've got Apply Quartz Filter
to PDF document. So that's the one I want. I'm going to drag it into here.
Then it's going to say, oh this is going to change the file so do you want to do 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. I'm going to just Not Add that make a copy. Then I'm
going to choose a filter and I'm going to select the one we created. I could choose
Reduce File Size. The original one but I'm going to do the one we made. Now I'm going
to Save this and just name it Compress PDF and save it as a Quick Action.
Now that it's saved as a Quick Action I can access it many different ways. One of those
is to Control click on the File and then go to Quick Actions and I should see it there.
I'm going to select it and it is automatically going to apply that. You saw briefly there
was a little gear up there saying it was working. Now if I get information on this original
file you can see it's 1.1 MB. It actually changed the file right there in place. 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. I can click on More and do Compress
PDF.
I can also customize if I'm using this a lot. I can go to the Finder here and I can move
Compress PDF up to the top here. You can see that puts it in the first slot. 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.
Notice when I created that Quartz filter there were other options. I could have had convert
PDF to black and white. I could have also created multiple filters to use in different
situations. So if I'm scanning something that has a lot of images in it and I want it to
be compressed but still keep some good image quality I could choose one filter. If I want
to compress them and it's not as important and it's mostly just black and white text
I could select another filter.
In Automator in addition to doing Quick Actions you can make an application so you can just
have it drag and drop onto an application. You can also do it as a folder action so any
PDF that you put into a specific folder automatically gets compressed.