Creating a PDF Portfolio With Pages

If you are an artist or photographer you may be asked to submit a PDF to schools or galleries. You can create a nice PDF portfolio using Pages and simply placing images on layout pages along with borders and text boxes. You can even include an information or bio page. Then just export as a PDF. The result is much better than just converting image files to PDFs.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: So let's say you're an artist or a photographer and you need to create a portfolio. The portfolio probably needs to be in a PDF format to submit it to galleries, schools, wherever you're going to send it. So you've got these JPEG images and now you need to create PDFs. Now you may be tempted to convert the JPEG images to PDFs using Preview or some other image editing app. But you're probably better off actually creating a nice portfolio document using Pages. For instance, I've got some pictures here. Let's create a portfolio using a few of those.
Some I'm going to run Pages here and create a New Document. Now depending upon the requirements you may want to choose, say, a vertical or horizontal one. Let's  do a horizontal one. I'm going to convert from the standard word processing document to Page Layout by going to File, Convert to Page Layout and convert it there. Now let's go and show layout here so I can see like the top and the bottom. I'm going to zoom out a little bit so I can see the entire page and I'm going to now add in some of those images.
So let me grab an image and I'm just going to drag and drop it in. So I can put it here. I can use these guides to kind of put it where I want. I can turn on Rulers to even give me a better idea where things are at. So we can put this image here. I can stretch to be, you know, full screen and I've got some space at the bottom. I want to use this space. So I'm going to create a text box here and I'm going to put maybe a title. You know maybe make that bold and a little larger. Maybe some sort of date there. Make that a little smaller, not bold. I can do whatever I want here with this text box. You can get real fancy with it. I'm just going to keep it simple. So I've got that.
I also want to select it and maybe put a border around it. Something simple. I mean I could do something like this that leaves a little bit of space or I could just do a solid line with a shadow. That kind of thing. Or just the shadow itself. Let's do that. It leaves a little bit of space around it there. I'll maybe now adjust it in to compensate for that border. So now I've got, kind of, what I want there and I can go ahead and do the same thing for the next page.
So I'll go and Add a Page. What might help is if I show the page thumbnails on the left so I can see the pages there. Two pages. Bring in another image. So I'll bring that one in and I will do the same kind of thing here. I will use this border for consistency. I will line it up to the left and right the same way. Maybe even to keep things consistent I'll copy this text box and go over here and paste it in and then change that there. So I've got that.
Now I can do other things if I want as well. For instance I can add a page and I can move it around. So I could put this page here at the top and maybe this is where I create, you know, put my name. Whatever is required of you there. So maybe I can just tap that there at the bottom left and make it a little bit bigger. So it's a page like that. I can even add an image maybe here if I wanted to.
So after I create my nice portfolio adding as much text as I want. Adding borders and all sorts of things. I can even do a page maybe that has like four images on it instead of just one. Then I can simply do File, Export To and say PDF. Change it to PDF. I probably want to use the best image quality for something like this. I'll save this out to the Desktop. Now I'll hide that. See here I've got the PDF here. Standard PDF.  Now I can send it to anybody on any machine that can read PDFs. They've got a nice portfolio. Much nicer than just converting a bunch of image files to PDFs.

Comments: 8 Responses to “Creating a PDF Portfolio With Pages”

Douglas Brace

6 years ago

How would using Pages for this be better than using Keynote, or are both fine for this type of task?

Gary Rosenzweig

Douglas: Both will work. Pages makes it easier to set up as a document, such as an 8.5x11 page size, etc. You can do it in Keynote, but you'd need to come up with screen dimensions that make sense.

Robert Douglass

Gary-
Is there an easy way, once you set up the first page, to make that page a template (or something similar), to ease the pain of adding, say, 20 pages more?
Thanks for your tutorials, I greatly appreciate them!

Robert: Yes. You can use Master Pages. I did a video on this: https://macmost.com/pages-master-pages.html
Of course you can also use copy and paste pretty effectively for this too.

Scott Dacey

Gary - Is there a way to bring two or three pictures on to a single page, while simultaneously reducing their dimensions to fit the page? Thank you.

Scott: Yes. Just drag as may images on a page as you wish, and resize as you wish.

Dan

Sometimes I use Keynote to make a collage, screen capture saved as a jpg or png then insert into pages and emails. An effective way for social media as well.

Just as a note, I used to use Corel to create collages when on a Windows PC, but had to improvise on the Mac.

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Creating a PDF Portfolio With Pages

Comments: 8 Responses to “Creating a PDF Portfolio With Pages”

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