Compressing PDF files in Mac OSX

[Dave2002]

I wonder if others have discovered any good/quick ways to compress PDF files using Mac OSX (aka macos).

I con do it using:

1. Scan any documents in using Preview - I use a high enough resolution to get a good quality image.
2. Use Preview to get the PDF into shape (sometimes combining more than one PDF into a single document by using the Thumbnails.

If the PDF file is large and thus not so suitable for sending via email, I can then shrink it by importing it into a photo tool, such as Affinity Photo or Affinity Designer, then re-exporting as a PDF (using a lower DPI) - or perhaps a JPEG file.

I just wonder if there's anyway to do the latter phases in Preview directly, or in some other inbuilt macos feature. Maybe use the Print to PDF feature? I think this only allows changing the page sizes though - I really want the pages to stay the same size, but the resolution to be reduced - and changing the DPI in the photo tools seems to do the trick.

[MrGongGong]

I don't use Preview to scan so would use Canon scanning tools then import into Photoshop or something else

though it does have some good features for dealing with Pdfs

[french frank]

How small do you want to get the file? Using the way they suggest with Preview, I can reduce a 60 page pdf from 2.4MB to 1.7MB, but I can't see how helpful that is.

[Dave2002]

How small do you want to get the file? Using the way they suggest with Preview, I can reduce a 60 page pdf from 2.4MB to 1.7MB, but I can't see how helpful that is.

Today I had a 6.8 Mbyte file which I wanted to reduce. I think I got it down to under 700 kbytes with a bit of effort. As I recall, if I'd loaded it into Word I might have been able to compress it (I'll have to check that again), but I didn't really want to do that, so I used photo editing tools instead. "Obviously" (well fairly so) I wouldn't have wanted to compress to the point at which quality would suffer a lot, but since I was merely trying to indicate suitable edits to someone who presumably had a high quality original at his end, this approach should have been working quite well. I used the Annotate feature of Preview first to indicate the sections to change - and then used text descriptions in the accompanying email.

What is the "way they suggest with Preview"?

[french frank]

What is the "way they suggest with Preview"?

Couldn't replicate it. In fact the original went up from 2.4MB to 2.7MB. Did I do something wrong

They say: Open the file in Preview, go to File in the menu bar > Export and in Quartz Filter, from drop-down menu, select Reduce File Size (change name to keep original intact), Save