Is it possible to adjust natively the size of the PDF file during compilation with pdflatex?

Question

I am a beginner in LaTeX, tentatively using it for industrial documents. I am working on a laboratory report containing little text and a large number of pictures. I prefer to leave the pictures at their native quality level for archival purposes and because a number of them get magnified by the elegant routines found at this link: How to create magnified subfigures and corresponding boxes for portions of a large image

I typically get a PDF file directly using pdflatex. The .pdf file I am working on contains 9 pages and has a size of 9000 KiB.

Post-processing the .pdf file with the routine below (launched from the same directory), and using the "prepress" option, I get a file size of about 6500 KiB, and 3500 KiB with the setting "printer".

I could not find any drop of quality with each of these two settings (there are two lower quality options available, "ebook", and "screen"), when printed on A3 paper with a 600 dpi laser printer, and I would like to get the "printer" quality natively (directly at the creation of the PDF files), in order to eliminate the post-processing operation. Is there a way to do this?

/usr/local/bin/gs -q  -dSAFER -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite 
  -PDFSETTINGS=/printer -sOUTPUTFILE=NameOfOutputFile.pdf  
  -f NameOfTargetFileToOptimize.pdf

Answer 1

I would go for a dedicated image manipulation program and create a temporary low quality version of the images. Compressing and resizing a lot of images can be lengthy.

For instance, if you are under Linux, the following command will create for each foo.jpg file a new file foo_small.jpg, with jpeg quality set to 60 and at most 1M pixels.

for f in *.jpg; do echo $f; convert $f -quality 60 -resize @1000000 `basename $f .jpg`_small.jpg; done

This could be expanded to a real script handling also .JPG or .jpeg files, maybe using a fixed resize ratio (e.g. halving), storing the low quality version in a new subfolder, etc.

There are other programs that can batch process a number of images.

Edit

Just to make the link from the comment below clickable:

How to make the PDFs produced by pdflatex smaller