How to Combine Photos and PDFs Into One PDF on a Mac
You have a signed form as a PDF, a few receipts photographed with your iPhone and a scanned page, and someone wants “one PDF, please”. A Mac gives you three ways to get there: the Finder’s Create PDF quick action (fastest, but no say over the pages), Preview (built in, fine for a few files), and the PDF Tools of Folia Files, which take any mix of PDFs and pictures, let you reorder, rotate and remove pages before saving, and put JPEG photos in as they are so the file stays small.
The short answer
- In a Folia Files pane, select the PDFs and photos (⌘-click to add files to the selection).
- Choose Tools › PDF Tools…: every page appears as a numbered thumbnail.
- Select pages, then use the arrows to move them, the rotate buttons to turn sideways photos and the trash button to leave a page out.
- Click Save as One PDF… (⌘S).
Your original files are never modified.
What macOS can already do
The Finder’s Create PDF quick action
Select the files in the Finder, Control-click them and choose Quick Actions › Create PDF. macOS writes the PDF straight away, next to your files. It’s the quickest route when the files are already in the right order and the right way up: there is no step where you check the order, turn a sideways photo or leave a page out.
Preview
Open the first PDF in Preview and show the page thumbnails in its sidebar. Drag the other PDFs and images onto that sidebar, where they belong, and drag thumbnails up or down to change the order. Then save the result.
It works, and it costs nothing. It gets fiddly with many files and photos: each file has to be dropped at the right spot in a long column of thumbnails, and phone photos often arrive in the wrong order or sideways. Also remember that Preview edits the PDF you opened. To keep it as it was, work on a copy, or save the result under a new name.
Combine photos and PDFs with Folia Files
The PDF Tools of Folia Files treat PDFs and pictures the same way: everything you give them becomes pages, and nothing is written until you save.
1. Choose the files
Select the photos and PDFs in a pane, then choose Tools › PDF Tools…. The tool opens in a tab with your selection (with nothing selected, it takes the pane’s folder). When the selection includes a PDF, PDF Tools… is also in the Control-click menu.
The Files column on the left lists what will be used; only PDFs and pictures are kept. Untick a file to leave it out, drop more files or whole folders on the column, or bring in files from elsewhere with Add… and Pane Selection. Selection Options can limit a folder to some extensions (only jpg, for instance) or leave out its subfolders.
2. Put the pages in order
The Pages column shows every page, numbered, in the order of the list on the left: folder by folder, then by name, with numbers sorted the way the Finder sorts them (IMG_9 before IMG_10). A ten-page PDF gives ten thumbnails; each photo becomes one page, upright and with the photo’s own proportions.
- Click a page to select it; ⌘-click or ⇧-click to add pages to the selection.
- Move Selection Earlier and Move Selection Later (the arrow buttons) move the selected pages one place per click.
- Rotate Left and Rotate Right turn the selected pages, or every page when none is selected.
- The trash button removes the selected pages from the result; the files themselves aren’t touched.
- Files dropped on the pages are added at the end. Clear All starts over.
3. Save one PDF
Click Save as One PDF… or press ⌘S. Folia Files suggests the name of the first page’s file followed by “(combined)”, in that file’s folder; change either if you like. Once the PDF is written, Folia Files takes you back to your files with the new PDF selected, and the Operations history lists it: undo that line and the new PDF goes to the Trash. If you choose to replace an existing file, that file is moved to the Trash rather than overwritten.
Why the combined PDF stays small
Photos are what make combined PDFs heavy. Stored as raw pixels, a single 12-megapixel photo takes about 36 MB. Folia Files puts JPEG photos into the PDF with their original compressed data, so the PDF weighs roughly what the photos weigh. HEIC photos from an iPhone are converted to high-quality JPEG on the way in. Other formats, such as PNG screenshots, are drawn at full resolution.
If the result is still too big for an email, Compress… (in the More Actions menu when the buttons don’t all fit) saves a copy with the images recompressed as JPEG for the screen, and tells you the size before and after. For scanned pages, Make Searchable (OCR)… saves a copy with the text recognized on your Mac, so you can select it and find the document by what it says, as explained in how to search inside files on a Mac.
One click: Combine into PDF
When your files are already named in the right order (scans numbered 01, 02, 03, or photos renamed by the date they were taken), you don’t need to look at the pages at all. The Quick Actions module of Folia Files (not to be confused with the Finder’s quick actions) has a Combine into PDF tile: select the files in a pane and click it, or drop files on it. It writes one PDF in name order, next to the first file, named after it with “(combined)”. Its progress shows in Operations, and ⌘Z sends the new PDF to the Trash.
To show the module, open the right sidebar (⌥⌘E), click the Modules button above it and tick Quick Actions.
It also works in a pane of its own: drag New Pane from the toolbar to an edge of the window, then choose Quick Actions in the grid.
Good to know
- PDF Tools and Quick Actions are in both editions of Folia Files, the one from the website and the one from the Mac App Store. More about them on the tools page.
- A PDF protected by a password isn’t added: Folia Files names it, so you can unlock it first.
- PDF Tools show the pages of up to 400 files at a time.
- The same tab can also save every page as its own PDF, in a new folder (Split into Pages), or save only the pages you selected.
