Melt guide

Convert an image to PDF on Mac

Need to turn one or more images into a PDF? Here's how to do it on macOS without paying for Acrobat.

4 min read

You need to send a scan to someone as a PDF, or you want to combine several photos into a single multi-page document. macOS actually has decent built-in support for this — you don’t need to buy Acrobat or install anything.

The native way: Preview

For a single image:

  1. Open the image in Preview.
  2. File → Export.
  3. Or File → Print, then in the print dialog click the PDF dropdown bottom-left → Save as PDF.
  4. Pick a location and save.

For multiple images into one PDF:

  1. Select all the images in Finder.
  2. Right-click → Open With → Preview (or just double-click — Preview opens them as a set).
  3. In Preview's sidebar (View → Thumbnails), drag the images into the order you want.
  4. Select all the thumbnails (⌘+A in the sidebar).
  5. File → Print → PDF dropdown → Save as PDF.

That gives you a single PDF with one image per page.

The native way: sips and pdfunite

sips doesn’t directly export to PDF, but you can use Automator’s Quick Actions or chain through magick:

brew install imagemagick
magick image.jpg image.pdf
magick *.jpg combined.pdf

That second command makes a multi-page PDF from every JPG in the folder.

The Finder Quick Action

macOS has a built-in Quick Action for this:

  1. Select the images in Finder.
  2. Right-click → Quick Actions → Create PDF.

The PDF appears in the same folder. Fast for ad-hoc work.

Where Melt fits

Melt isn’t a PDF tool — its job is image compression, conversion, and resize. Where it helps is before the PDF step: if your scans or photos are 50 MB each, compress them first so the resulting PDF isn’t massive. Download Melt.

Compress images first in Melt

  1. Open Melt.
  2. Drag your scans or photos in.
  3. Keep the format as JPEG.
  4. Set quality to 85.
  5. Optionally resize to ~2000px on the long edge.
  6. Click Compress.
  7. Use the compressed outputs in Preview's Create PDF flow.

Single PDF or multi-page?

What you lose, what you keep

Image-to-PDF re-wraps the image in a PDF container; if the image is JPEG, the JPEG data stays as-is and quality is identical. Print-to-PDF can re-encode at the system’s default JPEG quality, which sometimes drops quality slightly — use Export or magick if that matters. Page size defaults to letter or A4; the image is fit to the page with margins. If you need edge-to-edge, change paper size in the print dialog before saving.

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