Export a Smaller PDF From Pages on Mac

1. Open the document and choose File > Export To > PDF.
2. Click More Options to show the PDF settings.
3. Set Image Quality to Good. The choices are Good, Better and Best.
4. Click Next, name the file and save.

Good is the smallest and Best is the largest. Pick Good for email and screens. Pick Better or Best only if the PDF will be printed with photos that matter. Look at the result at 100% zoom before you send it.

Text and shapes stay sharp whatever you choose, because only the images are affected. We did not time or measure Pages exports for this guide, so there is no Pages byte count here. Your file will show the change directly in Finder.

A Pages document keeps the original images you dropped in, even when they are shown small. Choose File > Reduce File Size to shrink the images stored in the document. Apple describes this in its guide to reducing the document file size. Save a copy first, because the change is not reversible once the original images are gone.

This fixes the “Pages file too large” problem. It does not by itself set the PDF export quality, so do both if you need both.

Images, nearly always. A photo placed on a page at 3 by 4 inches still has every pixel from the camera. The export keeps most of that unless you lower the Image Quality. Fonts and shapes add little. To check, run pdfimages -list on the exported PDF. Our guide to large PDFs covers the full cause list.

pdfimages -list exported.pdf

Recompress the PDF. The free route is Preview: File > Export, then the Reduce File Size Quartz filter. We read that filter on macOS: JPEG quality 0.7, images resampled to 144 ppi, and a 2400 px cap. It is a fixed recipe and cannot be adjusted.

Resizing photos before they go into Pages gives the cleanest result, because there is nothing to recompress later. See Preview file size options and how to compress a PDF on Mac.

Resize a copy of each photo first, then drag the copy into Pages. A phone photo is often 4000 pixels or more across. On a page it shows about 6 inches wide at most, so 1800 pixels is already 300 ppi. Anything beyond that is weight nobody can see.

mkdir -p small
sips -Z 1800 *.jpg --out small

That writes resized copies into a small folder and leaves the originals alone. HEIC photos work the same way. Then place the copies in the document. If you already built the document, you can swap the images: select one, choose Image > Replace in the Format sidebar, and pick the small copy.

Two warnings. First, -Z only shrinks. It never enlarges a small image. Second, keep the full-size originals somewhere safe, because the small copies cannot be made sharp again. For many photos at once, see batch resizing images.

Do three quick checks. Look at the file size in Finder with Command-I. Open the PDF in Preview and zoom to 100% on the busiest photo. Then zoom to a line of small text, which should be crisp because text is not an image. If a photo looks muddy, export again at Better. If the file is under the limit you need, stop there. Smaller than necessary only costs quality.

Sending by email? The limit is measured after encoding, which adds weight, so leave some room. See compressing a PDF for email.

If the PDF comes out of Pages, lower the Image Quality first. That is free and happens at the source. Smol does not open Pages files, does not edit PDFs and does not OCR. For one document, Preview is also enough.

Smol earns $29 (once, one Mac) when you export many PDFs, from Pages and from other apps, and want them all compressed with a Finder right-click and kept on your Mac. See Smol and the preset guide.