How to crop a PDF on Mac
Trim the margins off a badly scanned document — on one page, or on all of them at once.
A scanned page often has more page around it than the page had: a black edge where the lid did not close, a grey margin from an oversized platen, a centimetre of nothing on every side. Cropping trims it.
Crop & Rotate is free and always will be. There is nothing to sign up for and nothing is watermarked.
Crop, step by step
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Open Crop & Rotate
From the document actions panel, under Pages.
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Drag the frame in
Handles on each edge and corner. Leave a small margin rather than cutting exactly to the text — a page cropped flush to its content looks wrong and prints worse.
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Decide how far it applies
To this page only, or to every page. A uniformly bad scan wants the whole document; a single oversized page wants just itself.
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Apply and check
Look through the thumbnails afterwards. Pages whose content sits differently from the one you set the crop on are where a document-wide crop goes wrong.
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Save
⌘+S.
What cropping actually does
Cropping changes the region of the page that gets shown. The content outside the crop is still in the file and another tool can reveal it by widening the crop again. That is fine for tidying up a scan. It is not a way to remove something sensitive from the edge of a page — for that, use redaction, which takes the content out.
When cropping helps
- Badly scanned documents with black edges or a grey border.
- Documents printed on the wrong paper size, leaving a band of nothing down one side.
- Making a document readable on a small screen — cropping away wide margins means the text can be larger at fit-width.
- Trimming crop marks and bleed off something prepared for print.
When it does not
- Anything official. Cropping changes the page and a cropped filing may no longer match the copy on record.
- Anything drawn to scale. A cropped plan no longer matches its own scale bar, and measurements taken from it afterwards will be wrong.
- Removing sensitive content. See the note above.
- Making a file smaller. Cropping hides content rather than removing it, so the file barely shrinks. Compression is the tool for that.
Cropping a folder of scans
If you have a batch of documents from the same scanner, they almost certainly share the same bad margin. A batch recipe applies the same treatment across a whole folder in one pass rather than one document at a time.
Frequently asked questions
How do I crop a PDF on a Mac?
Open Crop & Rotate from the document actions panel, drag the frame in, and choose whether it applies to one page or all of them. It is free.
Does cropping delete the content outside the frame?
No. Cropping changes what is shown; the content is still in the file and can be revealed by widening the crop. Use redaction to remove something properly.
Can I crop every page at once?
Yes. Check the thumbnails afterwards — pages whose content sits differently from the one you set the crop on are where a document-wide crop goes wrong.
Will cropping make my PDF smaller?
Barely. The hidden content is still in the file. Compression is the tool for reducing size.
Should I crop a scaled drawing?
Better not to. A cropped plan no longer matches its own scale bar, so measurements taken from it afterwards will be wrong.