Automatically Password Protect PDFs On The Mac

Occasionally, readers will ask me if there is a way on the Mac to automatically password protect a PDF, or even better encrypt a group of PDFs.

I always figured that this was something that could be done using Automator, but have never had the chance to sit down and figure it out.

Fortunately, now I don’t need to. The folks over at Mac OSX Automation have done that for me with their great Encrypt PDFs Service. I just tried it and it works really well.

Thanks to David Sparks for the tip via Twitter.

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About the Author

Brooks Duncan helps individuals and small businesses go paperless. He's been an accountant, a software developer, a manager in a very large corporation, and has run DocumentSnap since 2008. You can find Brooks on Twitter at @documentsnap or @brooksduncan. Thanks for stopping by.

Leave a Reply 3 comments

AustinErd - March 19, 2015 Reply

http://t.co/sFqvP1wsH4
Here is another way for that. Set restrictions for opening, copying, editing, and printing to make sure your files are safe even if they fall into the wrong hands.

Harvey - May 1, 2014 Reply

Brooks:

Thanks for this Automator encryption post. It fits my workflow perfectly. Each month I download my Visa bill and store the PDF in Evernote in a notebook called “Visa”. However since the PDF file contains my credit card number, I encrypt it before storage. Until I saw your post I’ve been opening the PDF in Acrobat and changing the properties to make the file password protected. It takes a few minutes to fill in the fields an test the result to make sure I entered the password correctly. Then I store the encrypted PDF in Evernote.

The Automator service is much faster, especially since I always use the same (very long) password for each monthly PDF. Perhaps the next step is to create a Hazel rule using Applescript to automatically encrypt the PDF and load it into my Evernote Visa Notebook.