Saving images how do I get it exact?

Have never tried making a book in Preview ... seems a bit limited in how you could arrange images. (The Photos app does have book-making capability, but haven't tried that for years now.)

The Pages app (Apple software : free in the App Store) seems to be great for creating a book. The app now has a choice of book templates that you add your content (eg: images) to. (The newest version requires macOS 12.3 or later, and the App Store generally downloads a version that is compatible with the MacOS used).

In Pages, you can easily adjust the size of images by selecting the image, and dragging to the size you choose (larger or smaller). If you wish, you can also crop (mask) an image, remove parts you don’t want and make adjustments to its background and exposure.

There is quite lot of choice in making each page precisely as you want. Eg: you can rearrange layouts (or pages) add, or remove, images as you go for the best effect.

You could print the book from the Pages app. or export the completed book to PDF or to other options (like ePub, Word etc.)

The "Pages User Guide" for Mac has a link to "Table of Contents" at the top of the welcome page that opens from the link below ... you can see the various topics, and detailed articles (eg: on working with images).

Pages User Guide for Mac - Apple Support

Hi Raarkarc,

welcome to the Apple (user-to-user) Community.

Wondering where you grab those images from in the beginning, and if you really need them to be PDF's..

Many times you can just drag an image to the desktop, which saves it just as it is. (eg: jpg, .png .heic etc.)

If you then drag a file into a Mail message window, you can choose: actual size, large, medium, small etc. to send.

If the white edges are on the original (or saved) image, you can open it in Preview, "select" the picture inside the white edges, and choose Tools > Crop to eliminate the white edges.

The Preview app also has other ways to work with images: Preview User Guide for Mac - Apple Support

All the best :-)

You're right ... 200 images are a lot to handle. Photoshop is the only app I know of that could likely re-size batches of images all to the same chosen size. (Yet photos are generally all 4" X 6" or 6" X 4" (or scaled up or down), for printing already.)

If I wanted a number of original books printed from images, I'd think it worth the effort to set it up properly in Pages, as a lot of the work is done for you with the book templates. Maybe the images are of similar size to the paper you'll be printing on ?

As for Landscape and Portrait into one... mmm... you could likely display two portrait images on one landscape page, (or two landscape images on one portrait page) to make the book's layout (using either landscape or portrait) more interesting. Of course the pages with 2 images would display those image at a bit smaller scale than the single image on a page, yet there'd be a lot less white space.

Seems you'd want to make a book to print as quickly and easily as we can make and export slide shows in the Photos app. I don't know of any way to accomplish that. I can see why you are experimenting with Preview.

For a single book:

I think I would be just having the images printed on photo-paper (eg: from a zip drive at a chain store), and then pop them into an album. (Have made some experimental "books" that way before, mostly one-off books for children.)

Re: File size:

Tried a book with a couple of Photos in Keynote ... exported to .pdf, and that more than doubled the photos Mb in size too. (2 X 1Mb photos = 4.5Mb book of 3 pages)

Professional image apps like Photoshop have loads more file-size options, though they are an expensive alternative to Apple's free software, and the skill in using them may not come so easily.

The Photos app can give some options when exporting pictures as slideshows (ie: to m4v file), ie: you would have some control over file size, yet may sacrifice the picture quality to a trained eye. Exporting 6 photos in original format (& with audio) as a slideshow created an 8.9Mb movie.

Using Pages app: A 10 page "landscape" book incorporating 16 cropped photos, (often two images to a page, and some pages with text only) was exported as .PDF and is 15.7 Mb. Exported as an epub file the same iBook s 12.3 Mb.

Thank you for letting us know we helped.

Cheers :-)