I like the current feature to scan inside Notes to create PDFs - even multipage ones. But if I open up the PDF and save it as a file it’s so huge! Like 9 MB for a page. If I want to send it to someone by mail I need to use something like the shortpdf site to compress it down for a few hundred KB.
Is there any standard way of doing this? Like within Notes itself?
A similar thing happens if I save a Safari webpage to a PDF (i.e. Books) on my iPhone or iPad. With my Mac I sometimes use an app called PDFShrink to reduce the file size. It has several options such as saving the PDF for printing, web downloads or email attachments. I guess there are similar apps for iOS.
Mr. Lerner, I don’t use Notes myself so can’t provide a Notes solution, but if you’re talking about doing this on your Mac, you could try Preview app.
There are several paths to your goal of emailing smaller pdfs.
For instance, Preview in Sequoia (and possibly earlier as well) can: scan documents (File > Import…); in File > Export… or File > Print, one can use Quartz Filter > Reduce File Size; and File > Share options include Mail and Notes.
The resulting quality of the file may or may not meet output/end use needs but at least that is an option.
If you’re talking iPhone/Pad, I haven’t opened Notes there in so long I don’t know if there is way to reduce the file size there. I just opened Files on iPhone, tapped and held a pdf and low on the popover window is “Quick Actions” which includes “Optimise File Size”. Not sure what happens then, if a duplicate is created or original pdf is undoably changed, but then one could send the result out most likely to Mail and Notes.
Then I thought, all these are multiple steps so maybe Shortcuts can put these steps together, but I didn’t try it yet; maybe there is already a Shortcut for ‘reduce pdf size and attach to new email/note’!
Anyway hope that helps.
I was scanning in Notes on my iPhone and then trying to save the file to later send to someone on my Mac running Sequoia. I tried the Quartz Filter > Reduce File Size just now and it worked well. Thanks!
I was about to post a similar topic when a message popped up saying we had discussed this before. And sure enough I posted about this in 2024!
I needed to scan 2 documents and make PDF files. Notes scanning is really awful. (1) It doesn’t flatten documents which may have arrived folded in a mail envelope; (2) the PDF files are visually overly large.
I redid the scans using Scanner Pro by Readdle, which I got in some bundle years ago, and both problems were gone. Nice, clean, reasonable-sized PDF files.
For photos I usually use Google Photo Scan which is great for scanning old photos.
What is the Notes scan feature good for? Anything?
Apple now supports the Preview app in IOS. As a test, I scanned a 1-page letter using both Notes and IOS Preview. The PDF produced by Notes was 3.4MB while the one produced by Preview was 1.5MB. Both scans were clean.
I’m looking at scan in Preview on my iPhone now. It works well. In fact the UI looks the same as Scanner Pro. In fact… I have dozens of scans already saved and I think I took most of those with Scanner Pro.
Did Preview scan buy out Readdle Scanner Pro or something? There definitely seems to be overlap!
Here’s was Duck Duck Go AI says regarding that. They both make use of the same available frameworks is all.
Interesting that I can see Scanner Pro scans in Preview though.
Apple added built-in document scanning to Preview (macOS) and the Files/Notes/Camera frameworks (iOS/macOS) using its own APIs; the UI similarities come from common scanning UX patterns (edge detection, crop/rotate, filters) and shared platform design conventions, not because Preview embeds or uses Readdle Scanner Pro.
All of which makes me wonder why they don’t use the same functionality inside Notes. The scan feature in Notes in iOS is awful compared to Preview or Scanner Pro.
Well, I wouldn’t say it’s awful, just inconvenient.
In fact, that super-spiffy screen you see on your iPhone or iPad is huge when it comes to dots. Just do a simple screen shot (no, no cropping, no adjustments) and see how large the full iPhone or iPad screen can be.
If you use something like ImageOptim you’ll see how much smaller screenshots can be but that’s because they run fancy things on all those dots.
I suspect Notes is just behind a bit is all.
Dave