← All guides

How to split a PDF on a Mac into separate files

Split one PDF into several on a Mac with Preview, Automator or one Terminal command. No upload, no account, and the original stays as it was.

Splitting means taking one PDF and making several smaller ones from it: one per chapter, one per page, or just the pages someone asked for. Your Mac can already do it three ways.

1. Preview: drag pages out

  1. Open the PDF in Preview and choose View > Thumbnails.
  2. Click the first page you want, then Shift click the last one to select a range. Command click picks pages that are not next to each other.
  3. Drag the selected thumbnails onto the desktop or into a Finder window. Preview makes a new PDF from just those pages.
  4. Repeat for the next part.

Another way to do the same: select the thumbnails, press Command C, then choose File > New from Clipboard and save the new document.

2. Automator: split into single pages

Automator, in your Applications folder, has a Split PDF action that breaks a PDF into one file per page. Make a new Quick Action, set it to receive PDF files in Finder, add Split PDF, and save. From then on you can Control click any PDF in Finder and split it from Quick Actions.

3. Terminal

If you use Homebrew, the free poppler tools include pdfseparate, which writes every page to its own file:

brew install poppler
pdfseparate report.pdf report-page-%d.pdf

Where the free ways fall short

Dragging works well for one or two parts and gets slow for a long file. Splitting every page is quick, but you usually want parts of several pages, such as every 10 pages for an upload limit.

The one click way

In Simply PDF, Organise Pages splits a PDF into files of any number of pages in one go, or pulls out just the pages you select. You see the parts before anything is saved, and the original is never changed.

Questions

How do I split a PDF on a Mac for free?

Open it in Preview, show thumbnails, select the pages you want and drag them to the desktop. Preview saves them as a new PDF. Repeat for each part.

Can I split a PDF into single pages on a Mac?

Yes. Automator's Split PDF action makes one file per page, and the free pdfseparate command does the same in Terminal.

Does splitting a PDF change the original?

Not with any of these methods. Each makes new files and leaves the original as it was.

More guides