How to Compress Keynote Presentations

When I give talks, I tend to use tons of pictures and screenshots combined with very little text. It works well with my style but has the downside of generating humongous Mac Keynote and pdf files. Sharing 100MB files is a pain.

Fortunately, thanks to the Unofficial Apple Weblog, I now have a simple solution.

Export the Keynote presentation as a pdf.
Open in Mac’s Preview application.
Choose “Save As…“and select”Reduce File Size” from the Quartz filter.
There is no step 4!

There is a noticeable drop in image quality — and shame on Apple for not allowing the user to control the amount of compression — but it dropped my project from 70MB to 3MB, so I’m happy!