How to Resize a PDF on Mac for Free?

Lily, a student who needs to complete a research articles recently, there are abundant document literature in PDF on her Mac. But, now she is very upset, those PDF files takes a lot of storage space so that her Mac run out of memory everyday, and she can not delete those PDF files. Is there free way to resize PDF file on Mac? The answer: Yes!

Preview: Resize a PDF on Mac Easily and Free

If there are a handful of PDF files on your Mac, you can directly use Preview to resize PDF files on Mac one by one. For some users those turned to Mac from Windows, they may don't know that they can directly resize PDF file on Mac free with built-in Preview. Preview is the application that enables users to open image and PDF file on Mac. And it also provides multiple functions, including reducing PDF file size, add signature to PDF, etc.

Steps to Resize PDF file on Mac with Preview

1. Find your PDF file that want to resize and open it on Mac with Preview.
2. Next, go to the top menu bar, and click the "File", then you need to choose "Export" as shown in the figure, after choosing, a window will pop up.
3. Now, you should rename your resized PDF file, and you also have to do another thing, selecting "Reduce file size" on the drop-down list of "Quartz Filter". And just click "Save" to complete the whole process of resizing PDF on mac.

Pros:

• Free
• No need to download and install any application on mac
• Preview the PDF before resizing

Cons:

• No batch PDF resizing
• File quality will be sacrificed during the PDF resizing

Automator: Resize Multiple PDFs on Mac Free

Automator is a free mac tool enabling users to build custom workflows for simple or complex tasks, for example, cropping images, combining multiple PDF documents or PPT files, extracting PDF text, playing movies, setting itunes, etc. With Automator, you will be able to resize a or multiple PDFs on mac for free.

Steps to resize PDF file on Mac with Automator

1. Go to Applications and run Automator on your mac
2. Choose “Workflow” to resize pdf on mac for free
3. Drag the following workflows from the left column to the right column.
   Files & Folders > Get specific Finder Items
   PDFs > Combine PDF pages
   PDFs > Compress Images in PDF Documents
   Files & Folders > Open Finder Items.
4. Then drag the PDF file that you want to resize into the section of “Get Specified Finder Items”(for resizing multiple PDFs, drag and drop all the PDFs into the section and hold “Shift” when selecting files to choose all files for resizing)
5. Hit “Run” on the top right to start resizing a PDF on mac for free
6. Go to File>Save, the resized PDF file will be saved on your mac.

Pros:

• Free
• No need to install any applications
• Batch resizing PDF on mac for free
• Combine all the resized PDFs into one

Cons:

• Image resolution is greatly sacrificed since Automator resizes PDF files by compressing the images in PDF files.
• Not easy-to-use, several steps are required to resize a pdf

Third Party PDF Resizer: Batch and Good-Quality PDF Compression on Mac

As you can see, free solutions to resize a pdf on mac is not perfect to keep the original file quality. If you need to deal with plenty of PDF files, and you don't want to resize them one by one with Preview. Or you have higher requirement on resizing PDF files on Mac, you can try a third-party PDF resizer. 

Cisdem PDF Compressor is your best choice, which makes it amazingly simple to reduce the size of 1 or multiple PDF files. This application provides 5 compression models for users, including Minimal File Size(1 dpi), Small File Size(72 dpi), Medium File Size(150 dpi), Large File Size(300 dpi) and Customized(Manually Input Parameters). And it will show you the compressed PDF file size of each mode, you can easy view the difference in quality as compared to the original, as well as the compressed PDF file size. More important, PDFCompressor for Mac supports batch mode, you can easily resize multiple PDFs at a time.

Steps to resize PDF file on Mac with Cisdem PDFCompressor

1. Click the "Free Download" button to start downloading the Cisdem PDF Resizer, and then you should launch it on your Mac.
   Free Download macOS 10.15 or later
2. Next, importing PDFs that need to be resized by clicking “Add Files…”,or by drag-n-drop, you can import up to 50 PDF files to the panel for resizing at one time.
3. Then you need to choose PDF compression model to resize pdf on mac as you like.
4. Click “Compress” to start resizing PDF file on Mac, just wait a moment, it will complete compression process since this application can compress a 500-page PDF file within 1 minute.

Pros:

• Shrink PDF on mac with original high quality
• Batch resizing pdf
• Fast speed
• Multiple resizing modes
• Easy to use

Cons:

• Not free