Go to the App Store on your Mac and search for 'Encrypto'. Luckily, there is a fantastic app called Encrypto (opens in new tab) which does a fine job of password-protecting individual files with AES-256 encryption. This command line encrypts the input PDF in.pdf with a 128-bit encryption user password USER and saves the protected PDF as out.pdf specified by option -outfile. pdftoolbox in.pdf -outfile out.pdf -userpassword USER -key128bit. A basic command line to encrypt a PDF is as follow. While it's to encrypt some files such as PDFs (as we show in the next section), macOS does not offer a general way of encrypting individual files, meaning you will need to rely on a third-party app for most of them. Open a terminal in your Mac OS, and you are able to use the program. How to encrypt files on Mac using Encrypto

It leaves the original folder without encryption or a password so the idea is that you will delete the original in favor of the new disk image.Īlternatively, you can use third party software to encrypt individual files, which we'll cover next.

If you don't want to encrypt your Mac's entire startup disk, you can learn how to password protect a folder on Mac instead – an action which also encrypts its content.īe aware, though, that doing this creates a new folder disk image.

Encrypt pdf mac