Creating PDF Photo Book on Mac

The PDF photo book of Bengali food I linked to in my previous posting was surprisingly difficult to create. Well, no, it's super easy to create; just hard to create in a way that actually works.

Here's the easy way (I'm a Mac/iPhone user; if you're not, sorry/not sorry!):

• Open Photos on Mac
• Select photos
• Command to Print
• Choose "Fill" in right sidebar (or whatever you want)
• Hit Print again, and choose "Save PDF". 
• Voila, a ginormous PDF with all landscape photos rotated to portrait.

Here's how to do it right:

Using an image editing app (I use GraphicConverter), set up a batch job (or go one-by-one if you're patient...it might be faster if you're not well-versed in the app) to:

1. Scale the photos to 1500 pixels long edge (ie. make the longest side 1500 pixels, so landscape and portrait photos scale equally). If you see an option, make sure it's set to scale horizontal and vertical proportionally.

2. Save as JPG. Even if they're already JPG! Because as you do this, you're offered a quality slider. Set it to 70 or 80.

3. Change Color Profile to sRGB IEC61966-2.1. In GraphicConverter, choose "Relative Colorimetric", and then, in Settings > Open > Color Profiles, set everything but greyscale to sRGB IEC61966-2.1. If you're a professional photographer or designer with terribly complicated and specific needs, you know not to do this. Otherwise, go ahead.

4. Remove Metadata

Run the conversion. Quality should be pretty close to original, at a small fraction of the file size.

Drag reduced photos into a new album in your Photos app.

Select all photos in the album, hit Print, choose "Fill" in right sidebar (or whatever you want), Hit Print again, choosing "Save PDF".

Here's the clever move. Open the PDF, and choose File > Export. In the "Quartz Filter" scroll menu, choose "Reduce File Size". Rename the file (so it doesn't overwrite the original, and save. There are other means of compressing PDFs, but they all affect photo quality. Note: Nothing in this whole workflow significantly reduces photo quality, though your PDF will be shockingly small.

Open the PDF, and choose View > Thumbnails. Scroll down, and click (in the sidebar) each landscape shot that's been forced into portrait and type Command R to rotate it back to landscape. Repeat for every such photo (go slowly, it's a clumsy process).

Save the PDF