Reducing Picture File Size

Hi. I have a bunch of pictures on my computer that I reduced in Preview (using Adjust Size) because they were taking up too much space on my hard drive.
However, after reducing them, I realized that my HD space was not increasing, but rather decreasing. I was told that what I actually did was create two photos. The original and then the reduced version. But I had been saving the new photos under the same name (so I thought they were being replaced).
How do I find the original files and delete them?
Thanks.

What does this have to do with iPhoto? Are you doing this size reduction in iPhoto with Preview or in the Finder with Preview?
Detail the workflow you're using.
OT

Similar Messages

Simple IPhoto Questions-How to reduce picture file size?

Hello,
I know how to reduce the size of photos using the Mail program, but is there a simple way to reduce the size of photo files and keep them for sending through the internet at later dates. I would like to keep the photos at their original size for viewing, but transfer photos to a file where they will be used to send over the net in much smaller format size.
thanks

As Larry says, you can resize the pics on Export using the File -> Export command.
and keep them for sending through the internet at later dates.
The intention in iPhoto is that you would only reduce the size on a case-by-case basis, rather than resize the whole library. As iPhoto always maintains the Originals this require quite a lot of disk space
Regards
TD

How do i reduce the file size of a picture?

I am trying to reduce the file size of a picture? It is 1.7MB and I need it to be smaller.
Help?

File -> Export
The two settings that most affect the filesize are Jpeg Quality and Size.
This User Tip
https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-4921
has details of the options in the Export dialogue.

How do I reduce the file size of my pictures

I am running out of space on my hard drive and notice that my iphoto library contains over 5000 pictures and is about 15GB. This is about 3MB per picture. I checked and lots are over 10MB. Most pictures I only print in 10x15, the largest i ever printed was A4 sized. I guess i don't need to keep such large files. These cameras are now set to make pictures with too many pixels I guess...
does anyone know of a way to reduce the size of all my picture files?
thanks
p

1. Reducing the file sizes of your pictures will not just reduce their quality when you print, it wll also negatively affect their quality no matter how you view them. Remember the screen quality on your next mac will be better than this one, and even more so on the one after.
2. The simplest solution to a size issue is to store the Library on an external disk, You can do this with iTunes and iMovie too.
3. If you really want to reduce the quality of your photos then there is no way to do that in iPhoto. Here's what you'd have to do:
Export the Pics from iPhoto (File -> Export) and in the Export dialogue make your choices on Jpeg Quality (the amount of compression used) and size (the dimensions)
Delete the pics from iPhoto
Import the ones who have exported back to iPhoto.
Give away your camera and get a lower quality one
Regards
TD

How to reduce image file size in spreadsheet

I have created a spreadsheet that contains cells with small amounts of text, and images that I brought in from the Media Browser from iPhoto. This has caused the file size to become HUGE, on the order of 234 MB. Saving it as a pdf only reduces it to 220 MB.
I have tried the Format>Image>Reduce Image File Size, as well as File>Reduce File Size, but in both cases, those options are grayed out.
What am I doing wrong? All I really want is thumbnail versions of my image files.
I don't understand what the Reduce Image File Size command would be used for, if it doesn't work for this?

When you insert a picture in a cell, it's used as a background.
To do that, the app keep it in a size allowing it to accomodate the larger cell size permitted.
If you want to get small images matching the cell size which you use, you must reduce the picture by yourself before inserting it. For instance, cells are often 72 * 16 pixels ones so you may reduce your pictures so that thir width become 72 pixels.
Of course, if the user enlarge the cell, the picture will become highly pixelated.
Look at this example.
In B4 is the original : 202 x 177 pixels
In C3 is the reduced one : 72 x 63
in B2 is the reduced one in a 202 x 177 pixels cell. It's awfully pixelized
We must arbitrate between size and quality.
Yvan KOENIG (VALLAURIS, France) samedi 10 septembre 2011 16:50:24
iMac 21”5, i7, 2.8 GHz, 4 Gbytes, 1 Tbytes, mac OS X 10.6.8 and 10.7.0
My iDisk is : <http://public.me.com/koenigyvan>
Please : Search for questions similar to your own before submitting them to the community

How do I reduce photo file size in Pages?

I am colaborating on a report that contains photos, which I want to exchange with my colleague via email. It's too big as is, but if I choose the Reduce File Size option, Pages over reduces and the photos become blurry and pixelated. If there a way to find a happy medium within Pages, and not be exporting to a pdf? Thanks in advance for any help.

Question asked and answered several times.
Adjust the picture files to fit your needs before inserting them in a Pages document.
My own scheme is :
build a draft document in which I insert the original pictures (tiff or png)
When the document's layout is OK, grab the dimensions of resized pictures.
Use a tool dedicated to pictures edition (they are numerous even if you want a free one).
to crop the pictures.
Re sample the cropped pictures with a rez between 80 dpi and 300 dpi according to your needs.
Then and only then, save as Jpeg to reduce the files sizes.
Remove the pictures embedded in you doc and insert the edited ones.
It may be useful to re-start from scratch and copy paste the text components if you applied masks to crop the pictures during the first step.
Yvan KOENIG (VALLAURIS, France) mardi 4 octobre 2011 15:38:27
iMac 21”5, i7, 2.8 GHz, 4 Gbytes, 1 Tbytes, mac OS X 10.6.8 and 10.7.0
My iDisk is : <http://public.me.com/koenigyvan>
Please : Search for questions similar to your own before submitting them to the community

Using Pages with iOS. How do I reduce image file size when I create a document with embedded images?

Hi,
I have created an annual family news letter in Pages on my iPad which incorporates pictures of events, holidays, occasions etc etc. I've then gone to covert it to pdf with the intention of sharing it via email but get a warning message about the resulting file size (in this case 16Mb).
Is there any way of reducing the file size - which is obviously being driven by the images? The pics are being pulled in from the iPad photo library.
Thanks Mike

(1) you are asking about Pages for iOS in a forum dedicated to Pages for OSX.
Most of us aren't using Pages for iOS so it would be more efficient to ask in the forum dedicated to iWork for iOS (at this time this discussion area isn't divided in three areas).
https://discussions.apple.com/community/app_store/iwork_for_ios
(2) As you understood why your file is huge, the answer is simple : reduce the size of your picture files before inserting them in Pages documents.
Drop the unneeded areas, reduce the resolution in tools dedicated to image processing before inserting them.
Yvan KOENIG (VALLAURIS, France) mercredi 21 décembre 2011 18:32:19
iMac 21”5, i7, 2.8 GHz, 12 Gbytes, 1 Tbytes, mac OS X 10.6.8 and 10.7.2
My iDisk is : <http://public.me.com/koenigyvan>
Please : Search for questions similar to your own before submitting them to the community

Retouch photo without reducing the file size/quality?

I have been retouching some pictures for use in a photo book but notice that each time I do so, the file size decreases fairly significantly e.g from 4MP to 2MP.
Is there a way I do minor retouching to a photo without reducing the file size/quality?
Thanks in advance

Where are you seeing this size reduction? What format are the original photos?
For example when you edit a RAW photos you create a JPEG modified version which is much smaller - one I just did went from 17 MB as RAW to 4.4 as a JPEG -- you could save as a TIFF but to me that is not worth the space loss - I seriously doubt that you will ever do anything that you can see the difference in quality between a TIFF and JPEG of yoru images
LN

What is image dpi after "Reduce Image File Size"

Does anyone know the resulting image dpi after using the "Reduce Image File Size" command in pages? My mother is trying to prepare some things for pre-press, and can't send her document to the printing press, because the pages docs are friggin huge! I'm trying to give her the easiest option for resizing all of the many images in the document, but don't know if this is a viable option if the end product needs to be printed. I need the output to be at least 300dpi.

As fruhulda wrote, asking Pages to apply changes to the pictures isn't the good path.
In fact, it's a perfect way to get a fat file.
My practice is :
Prepare the document in Pages to define the wanted size of every embedded pictures.
Edit the picture files in a tool dedicated to this task so that the resulting files will be 300 dpis ones for the wanted sizes.
Then, replace the original pictures by the definitive ones.
In most cases, the file will be lighter than the original one and you will have the 300 dpis resolution (except if you apply shadows but it's an other story).
Yvan KOENIG (VALLAURIS, France) lundi 20 décembre 2010 19:36:56

Is there a way to "compress" or reduce keynote file size?

I have transferred some PowerPoint presentations to Keynote and in general have had no difficulty. However, I can "compress" the pictures in PowerPoint which makes the file size much smaller.
Is there any way to reduce the file size of a Keynote presentation?
Thanks,
GS KLIVANS
MacBook Pro Mac OS X (10.4.10)
MacBook Pro Mac OS X (10.4.10)

hi I am trying to do a project of putting a keynote saved as a quicktime into garageband and adding audio and then compressing it via Share ...sent to itunes etc. It does get smaller.
But Are there any experts out there on putting a keynote with narration into garageband. I loose all of the timing control when I send it to quicktime. It seems like a LOT of steps.
Also, putting a narration into keynote is so long. Power Point just lets you record the narration on each slide. So I was putting it into garageband and trying to add the narration podcast style. Any suggestions.

A simple and free way of reducing PDF file size using Preview

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: https://discussions.apple.com/message/6109398#6109398
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: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/41548940/PDF%20compression%20filters%20%28Un zip%20and%20put%20in%20your%20Library%20folder%29.zip
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. 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"
Here is how to use it:
Open a PDF file using Apple's Preview app,
Choose Export (or Save As if you have on older version of Mac OS X) in the File menu,
Choose PDF as a format
In the "Quartz Filter" drop-down menu, choose a filter "Reduce to xxx dpi yyy quality"; "Reduce to 150 dpi average quality - STANDARD COMPRESSION" is a good trade-off between quality and file size
Here is how it works:
These are Quartz filters made with Apple Colorsinc Utility.
They do two things:
downsample images contained in a PDF to a target density such as 150 dpi,
enable JPEG compression for those images with a low or medium setting.
Which files does it work with?
It works with most PDF files. However:
It will generally work very well on unoptimized files such as scans made with the OS X scanning utility or PDFs produced via OS X printing dialog.
It will not further compress well-optimized (comrpessed) files and might create bigger files than the originals,
For some files it will create larger files than the originals. This can happen in particular when a PDF file contains other optomizations than image compression. There also seems to be a bug (reported to Apple) where in certain circumstances images in the target PDF are not JPEG compressed.
What to do if it does not work for a file (target PDF is too big or even larger than the original PDF)?
First,a good news: since you used a Save As or Export command, the original PDF is untouched.
You can try another filter for a smaller size at the expense of quality.
The year being 2013, it is now quite easy to send large files through the internet using Dropbox, yousendit.com, wetransfer.com etc. and you can use these services to send your original PDF file.
There are other ways of reducing the size of a PDF file, such as apps in the Mac App store, or online services such as the free and simple http://smallpdf.com
What else?
Feel free to use/distribute/package in any way you like.

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. 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.

How can I reduce the file size of a pdf when exporting?

I don't want to just choose between high quality print or smallest file size.
I want to export it from 60MB to 40MB.
Can I do this manually? When I use smallest file size the quality is too low and the content looks bad.
But high quality print exports my PDF at 60MB which is too big.

You cannot simply legislate the size of a PDF file. If you content is primarily text and vector, there is not much at all you can do to reduce PDF file size other than to cut out content. Otherwise, the only other variables are those of downsampling and compressing the raster images from your content.
You must be very careful in choosing the PDF export settings. The “smallest size” settings yield PDF files that realistically really are not fit for printing and may mess up any CMYK colors. The “high quality print” and “PDF/X-4” settings yield best print output, but yield the largest PDF files since they do less image resolution downsampling and only the maximum quality lossy JPEG compression.
I would recommend that you start with either the “high quality print” or the “PDF/X-4” settings and make a custom set of export settings. Assuming that you aren't going for offset or gravure printing, change the color image and grayscale image downsampling values from 300 and 450 to either 200 and 275 or no less than 150 and 225. If that doesn't give enough file size reduction, change the compression image quality from “Maximum” to either “High” or no less than “Medium.” Beyond these changes, you may end up with PDF files that will neither print nor display with any reasonable quality.
- Dov

How can I reduce the file size of 3 videos?...

...without losing quality? These three videos are as follows in terms of size and length of the video:
1) 148MB 19minutes
2) 357MB 18minutes
3) 164MB 14minutes
I tried using a video converter to reduce the bit rate in order to reduce the size, which i know affects the quality, but that did not actually work to reduce the file size this time.
I thought perhaps i should ask my forum friends for help on this matter. How,if at all, can I get all three of these MOV's under 100mb or to a total of 300mb for all 3 and preserve quality? It has to be able to play on an ipad (MOV or MP4). Thanks for your help!

I think that the point that David was trying to make is that reducing the amount of information originally provided by a product or part of it in order to make it smaller will inevitably reduce the efficiency of the product itself.
However, you don't have access to the original masters? Then you might be after a good compromise, meaning a video that can display decent quality while playing at its original frame size (say on the web).
Does this mean that there is no real way to reduce the size without losing quality?
If your target is the web there is a way to reduce the file size and still make it look decent enough. Re-compression means loss of source information but video compression is an art on its own and can produce some amazing results!
Not without testing though.
Now back to my previous post, use Compressor to try to reduce the file size and compare the result quality. Trust your eyes and be honest with yourself.

How can I reduce the file size when PDF Optimizer does not do much?

I have a PDF form that exists of 48 pages. 44 pages are forms / have form fields, the other 4 are just informative. Each form-page has approx. 80 fields (checkboxes, text fields).
When I started setting up the PDF form the file size was 12 MB and I had placed fields on 21 pages. Then with 34 pages the file size was 19 MB. And with 40 pages it was 35 MB big! Finally with 44 pages the file size is 34 MB.
So I searched with Google and found some tips. Using the "PDF Optimizer" option inside Acrobat for example. So I did, and the file was reduced only with 3 MB... 31 MB was the file. Also used the option "Save as.... Optimized".... no difference. I also found a suggestion about removing embedded fonts. Using the "Audit Space Usage" option I noticed the fonts taking many MegaBytes:
* Content Streams: 5.287.000     15,09 %
* Fonts:                24.556.810     70,08 % !!
* Acrobat forms:      3.349.164    12,05 %
In the older PDF version (I saved and kept this one too) with just 21 pages with form-fields, the "Audit Space Usage" shows:
* Content Streams: 5.292.000     40,14 %
* Fonts:                 1.290.224     9,79 %
* Acrobat forms:      1.588.758    12,05 %
So I could save many many MegaBytes by -UnEmbedding- fonts. But if I do this (unembed ALL fonts), the file size stays almost the same!?!?!? Why? What can I do to reduce the file size? I would like it to be 8 MB if possible (32 MB - 24 MB = 8 MB)?
Thank you for your help!

If you have authored the form, reduce the number of different fonts for the content and form fields.
Any font used in a form field will cause that font to be embedded into the PDF.
If you are going to Optimize the PDF be very careful with forms. Optimization does a lot of removal of items and rearranging of items which can really mess up forms.

How do I reduce the file size of a pdf to email?

I have a 260 MB pdf file generated from Photoshop 6. I can't seem to reduce the size in Photoshop. Is there anyway to reduce the pdf outside of Photoshop? Thanks in advance for any help.

Hi Scott,
That's a pretty big PDF! You'll have to reduce it pretty dramatically to attach it to an email. But, you can use Acrobat to reduce the file size. Please see this video for pointers: https://acrobatusers.com/tutorials/how-to-compress-a-pdf-file
If you don't have Acrobat, you can try it for free for 30 days. For more information, see www.adobe.com/products/acrobat.html.
Best,
Sara

Reducing Picture File Size

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