Adobe’s PDF format is probably the most widely used and versatile file type for sharing digital documents. One of its major advantages is its multiplatform nature, which means that PDF documents can be viewed on virtually any smartphone, tablet or computer. So it’s no wonder that macOS includes native support for viewing and creating PDF files even from images.
Use “Preview” to create your PDF documents
The key lies in the “Preview” application that comes standard on all Mac computers. It is one of the basic apps that we use every day and with it it is possible to create a single multipage PDF document from several images. This feature is especially useful when you’ve run out of documents and want to share them by email, Telegram, WhatsApp, or any other means. Let’s figure out how to do it.
In the Finder, select all the images you want to include in the PDF (you can do this by dragging the mouse cursor, or selecting them one by one while holding down the Command key).
Now right-click and select Open with → Preview
In the Preview sidebar, sort the images as you wish. Just drag the thumbnails to sort them. Use the Rotate button on the Preview toolbar to change the orientation of pages one by one (or select multiple pages to rotate them simultaneously).
From the menu bar, select File → Print…, and then click on “Show Details” to expand the dialog box and access all available options. Make sure that the “All” option is selected in the Pages options.
Select Save as PDF from the “PDF” drop-down menu in the lower left corner of the print dialogue box.
Now you only have to choose the location where you want to save the document, the name you want for your file, add a title, author, keywords (if you want it), and when you have it ready, click “Save”.
Finally, note that you can access the Save as PDF option from the Print dialogue box of a wide variety of applications in macOS, not just Preview. So you can use it to create PDF files from web pages viewed in Safari, or Word documents opened in Pages, for example.