There are a number of Mac utilities that will compress PDF files for easier e-mail sending, or, for developers, to reduce the size of an application bundle that includes lots of PDFs; and are just a couple examples. But many people don’t realize that Mac OS X’s own Preview application can reduce the size of PDF files without any additional software—and without actually performing any compression. You just open a PDF in Preview and then save it (as a PDF) again; the resulting file will usually be significantly smaller than the original with no difference in quality.
PDF Shrink 4.9.1 - Compress PDF documents. Download the latest versions of the best Mac apps at safe and trusted MacUpdate. The must-have tool is iSkysoft PDF Editor 6 Professional for Mac (or iSkysoft PDF Editor 6 Professional for Windows) for ensuring great compressing results. This optimization of your PDF file can be done by using this amazing compression tool.
![Compress Compress](http://cdn.osxdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/reduce-file-size-filter-for-pdf-preview.jpg)
(Note that Preview Save dialog includes, in the Quartz Filter pop-up menu, a Reduce File Size option. However, this option uses compression, so it reduces the quality of images and text in the resulting PDF. If you simply re-save a PDF, without this option, no compression occurs.) How does this work if Preview isn’t actually compressing images? The program is simply using OS X’s built-in PDF-processing features to strip PDF files of all the unnecessary bits: preview images, metadata, and the like. This feature is especially useful for PDFs created in Adobe Illustrator and InDesign, which tend to be unnecessarily large because of program-specific components and other non-vital data these applications save inside each PDF.
But if you’ve got a bunch of PDFs to shrink, or if this is a task you perform on a regular basis, opening and re-saving each file separately is a hassle. Just ask the fine folks at, makers of Mac Gems and: They were using the Preview-save trick to reduce the size of the many PDF graphics inside each of the company’s programs.
To save time and effort, they wanted a way to automate this process.so they created an app for that. The result is, a simple, free utility that uses OS X’s PDF capabilities to quickly shrink PDF files.
You just drop one or more PDFs onto the ShrinkIt icon, or into the ShrinkIt window, and in a few seconds you’ll have smaller versions of those files, saved in the same location as the originals; each original is renamed with org at the beginning of its name. As an example of ShrinkIt’s effectiveness, I dropped 13 InDesign-created PDFs—each of which was saved with InDesign’s extra options disabled, so the files should have already been as small as possible—onto ShrinkIt. The resulting batch of files was 25 percent smaller: 16.3MB compared to the original 21.7MB. In my testing, ShrinkIt was able to reduce the file size of PDFs containing a combination of text and images by as much as 35 percent, although I’ve seen reports of shrinkage of up to 95 percent for files that contain mostly vector images.
(The procedure works best on vector PDFs with lots of extraneous data, so ShrinkIt won’t provide significant file-size reduction for every PDF. In fact, for some PDFs that include lots of bitmap content, the resulting file can actually be larger than the original—sometimes significantly so.) If you regularly work with PDF files, ShrinkIt is a great utility to keep around to keep your PDFs slim without affecting their readability or image quality. Updated 2/18/2010, 10:45am: Clarified difference between re-saving a PDF and re-saving using the Reduce File Size option. Want to stay up to date with the latest Gems? Sign up for the for a weekly e-mail summary of Gems reviews sent directly to your Inbox.
Note: this is a copy and update of a 5 year old discussion in the Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard discussions which you can find here: This is a simple and free solution I found to reduce the file size of PDFs in OS X, without the high cost and awful UI of Acrobat Pro, and with acceptable quality. I still use it every day, although I have Acrobat Pro as part of Adove Creative Cloud subscription. Since quite a few people have found it useful and keep asking questions about the download location and destination of the filters, which have changed since 2007, I decided to write this update, and put it in this more current forum. Here is how to install it:. Download the filters here:. Unzip the downloaded file and copy the filters in the appropriate location (see below).
Here is the appropriate location for the filters: This assumes that your startup disk's name is 'Macintosh HD'. If it is different, just replace 'Macintosh HD' with the name of your startup disk. If you are running Lion or Mountain Lion (OS X 10.7.x or 10.8.x) then you should put the downloaded filters in 'Macintosh HD/Library/PDF Services'. This folder should already exist and contain files. Thanks ioscar. The original link should be back online soon. I believe this is a Dropbox error about the traffic generated by my Dropbox shared links.
I use Dropbox mainly for my business and I am pretty upset by this situation. Since the filters themsemves are about 5KB, I doubt they are the cause for this Dropbox misbehavior! Anyway, I submitted a support ticket to Dropbox, and hope everything will be back to normal very soon. In the meantime, if you get the same error as ioscar when trying to download them, you can use the link in the blog posting he mentions. This is out of topic, but for those interested, here is my understanding of what happened with Dropbox. I did a few tests yesterday with large (up to 4GB) files and Dropbox shared links, trying to find the best way to send a 3 hour recording from French TV - French version of The Voice- to a friend's 5 year old son currently on vacation in Florida, and without access to French live or catch up TV services.
![Reduce pdf size mac Reduce pdf size mac](/uploads/1/2/4/2/124253793/797675527.jpg)
One nice thing I found is that you can directly send the Dropbox download URL (the one from the Download button on the shared link page) to an AppleTV using AirFlick and it works well even for files with a large bitrate (except of course for the Dropbox maximum bandwidth per day limit!). Sadly, my Dropbox shared links were disabled before I could send anything to my friend. I may have used a significant amount of bandwidth but nowhere near the 200GB/day limit of my Dropbox Pro account.
I see 2 possible reasons to Dropbox freaking out: - My Dropbox Pro account is wronngly identified as a free account by Dropbox. Free Dropbox accounts have a 20GB/day limit, and it is possible that I reached this limit with my testing, I have a fast 200Mb/s internet access. Or Dropbox miscalculates used bandwidth, counting the total size of the file for every download begun, and I started a lot of downloads, and skipped to the end of the video a lot of times on my Apple TV. I've been looking for reliable ways to compress pdf. Quartz filters are one way to do it, but it has always troubled me that the results are often unpredictable.
I've used these Quartz compresson strategies to reduce the size of many pdf documents. While a lot get smaller (yay!), some get bigger (oh, crap!).
Never had any explanation for that. What I think is going on is that Quartz doesn't do jpeg compression, but rather a compression strategy that is more appropropriate for text and line drawings. So if you have a document with a lot of jpeg images in them, this compression strategy probably won't work. It certainly won't work for pdfs that are basically made of jpeg images, such as what you get when your document was produced by most scanning routines, including the ubiquitous VueScan.
All pdf documents aren't created equal, and compression really should be a rule-based strategy as in, if you have this kind of document, do this, but if you have that kind, do that. Would be nice if someone knowledgable would weigh in on that.
I like smallpdf.com very much, and it works great on jpegs, but since the application is remotely based, you're basically shipping your document off to someone else to get it compressed. One has to wonder about data mining, in that case.
I am trying to understand a strange case. I had a 48 page ppt file converted to pdf that took 4.5MB, so far so good. I cut the first 23 pages away with preview and I get a file with the last 25 pages but the size is now 19.4MB I try to reduce its size with the standard 'reduce file size filter' and, low and behold, I get a 280MB file, yes the size is multiplied by 15 more or less. Desperately trying to reduce the size, I came accross this thread, downloaded the filters tried with the standard recommended filter and same result 280MB.
OK, let's give up on quality and choose the 75dpi, low quality option, result is still 279.2MB! Does anyone have a clue of what causes this file of reasonable size to blow up out of proportions! Thank you very much for any help!
Think that pretty much exemplifies the issue here. I've had exactly the same experience. My experience with these and other Quartz filters for pdf file compression is basically flip-the-dice, cross-your-fingers, and say a prayer. They might work well, but they might work horribly. As I mentioned, as a free option, smallpdf.com has never failed me, though it involves sending your document to someone else. I've used the limited-time trials of several of the commercial pdf compressionsoftware, and they also work marvelously.
So you get what you pay for, in those cases. I think what it means is that writing pdf in Preview isn't smart, if you want to conserve or reduce file size. I wish I knew why that was the case. Jerome - I'm having trouble with this part: Here is the appropriate location for the filters: This assumes that your startup disk's name is 'Macintosh HD'. If it is different, just replace 'Macintosh HD' with the name of your startup disk.
If you are running Lion or Mountain Lion (OS X 10.7.x or 10.8.x) then you should put the downloaded filters in 'Macintosh HD/Library/PDF Services'. This folder should already exist and contain files. Once you put the downloaded filters there, you should have for example one file with the following path: 'Macintosh HD/Library/PDF Services/Reduce to 150 dpi average quality - STANDARD COMPRESSION.qfilter'. If you are running an earlier vesion of OS X (10.6.x or earlier), then you should put the downloaded filters in 'Macintosh HD/Library/Filters' and you should have for example one file with the following path: 'Macintosh HD/Library/Filters/Reduce to 150 dpi average quality - STANDARD COMPRESSION.qfilter' I've DL the filters and it's just a folder with the 'filter's saved as a document? I'm not sure where to save them from here or how? Could you please walk me thru this?
I have Moutain Lion 10.8.3 and I'm not sure where to find the Library/PDF Services file? Hi Jerome, I respect that you have spent a lot of time setting this up, but why not just use Automator App (in the Applications folder) to do the same thing? Create a workflow, to load the PDF, you can load one PDF or can even combine multiple PDFs, Compress the images in the files to a variety of qualities and then either open or save the new compressed file. I'm not saying what you are doing is incorrect, but it seems to me that this funtionality is already built into OSX.
I use it all the time for my University assignments, before I submit, as the uni has strict upload limits. I works flawlessly for me, with documents from Word, Pages, Excel, Numbers, PowerPoint, Keynote, and Scanned documents too. Jerome - thank you SO much for spelling this out for me!! It was very easy once going through step - by step.
Also thanks to ipsyd - that shortcut to the Library totally worked! I'm so excited to downsize my massive real estate contract!
Haha actionmaker - I did try the workflow in automater, but couldn't figure it out. Migth need a step-by-step there too 🙂 Thanks to all for all your help!
If I could just figure out how to send property pictures to my office admi via the Mac Mail assistant WITHOUT it being embedded in the body of the email.;0. Apple Footer. This site contains user submitted content, comments and opinions and is for informational purposes only. Apple may provide or recommend responses as a possible solution based on the information provided; every potential issue may involve several factors not detailed in the conversations captured in an electronic forum and Apple can therefore provide no guarantee as to the efficacy of any proposed solutions on the community forums. Apple disclaims any and all liability for the acts, omissions and conduct of any third parties in connection with or related to your use of the site. All postings and use of the content on this site are subject to the.