everyday mac tools

Split a PDF into separate files on a Mac

· 5 min read

Open the PDF in Preview, show the thumbnail sidebar, select the pages you want and drag them to the Desktop: Preview writes a new PDF containing only those pages. For a page range, use File, Print, set the range and choose Save as PDF. For one file per page, the Shortcuts app has a Split PDF action that does it in a single step.

Nothing here needs an upload, and none of it changes the original unless you tell it to.

Pull pages out with the sidebar

This is the method for “I need pages 4 to 6 as their own file”, and it takes less time than reading about it.

  1. Open the PDF in Preview.
  2. Choose View, Thumbnails. The sidebar shows every page.
  3. Click the first page you want. Shift-click to extend to a range, or Command-click to add pages that are not next to each other.
  4. Drag the selected thumbnails out of the Preview window and drop them on the Desktop or into a Finder window.

Preview creates a new PDF named after the original, containing the selected pages in the order they appeared. The original file is untouched. Repeat with a different selection for the next chunk.

Two things to know. Annotations, form fields and highlights on those pages come along, which is usually what you want. And the pages are copied, not moved; if you also want them out of the original, that is a separate step, covered below.

Save a page range with the print dialog

When the pages are contiguous and you want a clean copy with nothing floating on top, the print route is the tidier tool.

  1. Choose File, Print.
  2. Under Pages, choose the range. Preview’s print dialog also lets you pick Selected Pages in Sidebar if you have selected them already.
  3. In the PDF menu at the bottom-left, choose Save as PDF, and name the file.

The result is a new PDF drawn through the print path. Annotations and filled form fields are flattened into the page, which is convenient for a signed contract and inconvenient if you wanted to keep editing them. Links stop being clickable. Bookmarks are not carried over. For extracting a chapter to send to someone, none of that matters; for splitting a working document you intend to keep editing, use the sidebar instead.

One file per page with Shortcuts

Both Shortcuts and Automator ship with an action called Split PDF that turns a PDF into one file per page. Shortcuts is the simpler of the two.

  1. Open Shortcuts (it is in Applications) and click the plus button to make a new shortcut.
  2. Search the action list for Split PDF and add it. Its input can be a file you pick each time, or the file passed in when you run it from Finder.
  3. Add a Save File action after it, or set the shortcut to receive files and use it as a Quick Action from Finder’s right-click menu: in the shortcut’s details, turn on Use as Quick Action, Finder.
  4. Run it on a PDF. You get one PDF per page.

Automator’s version, Split PDF under PDFs in the action library, does the same thing and lets you set an output folder and a naming pattern (same as the input name, or a custom name with the page number appended) and choose whether to replace existing files. Save it as a Quick Action and it shows up in the same Finder menu. If you have used Automator before, it is the more controllable of the two; if not, Shortcuts is quicker to set up.

Neither can split by a number of pages or at bookmarks. Both split into single pages, and if you want groups you combine them afterwards, which is easy in Preview by dragging thumbnails from one window into another. Merge PDFs on a Mac without uploading them anywhere covers that side.

Remove the pages from the original

If the goal is two documents where there was one (the first half and the second half), split by copying pages out as above, then delete them from the original. Do this on a duplicate, because Preview saves page deletions back into the file.

  1. Choose File, Duplicate, and save the copy under a new name.
  2. In the copy, select the pages to remove in the sidebar and press Delete.
  3. Save.

If you delete pages in the original by mistake, the Revert To item in Preview’s File menu can usually bring back an earlier version, but a duplicate is the reliable habit.

Splitting many PDFs, or splitting them in a particular way

At some point the request stops being “pages 4 to 6” and becomes “every 10 pages”, “at each bookmark”, “every scanned invoice into its own file”, or “this same split across forty documents”. macOS has no built-in tool for any of those, and the honest answer is that you either do them by hand in Preview or use a dedicated PDF app.

Basalt has a Split tool built for those cases, alongside page tools for reordering, rotating and deleting, and a Procedures tool that records a set of steps so the same split runs the same way on the next batch. It works entirely on the Mac, writes new files and never modifies the original. It is a paid app after a 24-hour trial with every tool available, and if your splitting needs are covered by the sidebar and Shortcuts, you do not need it.

What travels with a split page

A page pulled out of a PDF is not only its visible content. The new file can inherit the document’s metadata (title, author, creation application), any attachments embedded in the document, and depending on the method, the original’s bookmarks and form structure. If you are splitting a document in order to send part of it to someone who should not see the rest, that matters.

What a PDF still hides goes through the places content survives, and Remove metadata from a PDF on a Mac before you share it covers cleaning the new file before it goes out. For a split done through the print dialog, most of that is already dropped, which is one argument for that route when the recipient is outside your organization.

Questions

Does splitting reduce the quality of the pages? Dragging thumbnails out copies the page content as it is, with no re-encoding. The print route redraws the page and can re-encode scanned images, so if the source is a scan, compare the two before you commit to one.

Can I split a password-protected PDF? Only once it is open. If you know the password, enter it, and the methods above work; the copies are written without the password unless you add one again. If you do not know the password, nothing on the Mac will remove it, and neither will the tools mentioned here. Remove the password from a PDF you own on a Mac covers the case where you do have it.

How do I split a PDF from the Terminal? macOS does not ship a command-line PDF splitter. The nearest built-in equivalent is a Shortcuts or Automator workflow you can run from Finder, which is what the section above sets up.

What is the fastest way to split every other page, for a double-sided scan that came out in the wrong order? Automator has an action for exactly this, called Extract Odd & Even Pages, under PDFs. Point it at the scan and it writes an odd-pages file and an even-pages file you can then merge in the right order.