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Organize June 24, 2026 3 min read

Removing Blank Pages from Scanned Documents

Multi-page scanners often add blank pages between sheets. Here's how to find and remove them without going through 200 pages manually.

Multi-page scanners — especially in duplex mode on single-sided documents — frequently add blank pages between sheets. A 50-page document becomes a 100-page PDF where every other page is blank. Cleaning it up makes the file 50% smaller and far easier to read.

Find the blanks first

Open the PDF in a viewer with thumbnails (Preview on Mac, Edge or Chrome's built-in viewer on Windows). Scan the thumbnail grid quickly — blank pages are obvious (solid white). Note the page numbers.

For a typical "every other page blank" duplex artifact, the blanks are usually the even-numbered pages: 2, 4, 6, 8, ... For other patterns, write down whichever ones are blank.

Remove with one operation

Open SwitchPDF Remove Pages, upload the file, and enter the blank page numbers comma-separated:

2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, 18, 20

For long ranges, group them. To remove every even page from 2 to 100:

2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14, ..., 100

Yes, you have to list them out. There's no "remove every other page" shortcut in most tools — the inputs are explicit by design.

Generating the page list

For "remove every even page" on a long document, generate the list in a spreadsheet:

  1. Open Excel/Google Sheets
  2. Column A: =2*ROW() → fills 2, 4, 6, 8 ...
  3. Copy down for as many pages as needed
  4. Then =TEXTJOIN(", ", TRUE, A1:A50) produces the comma-separated string

Paste that into Remove Pages and you're done.

Better: prevent the blanks at scan time

Most scanners have a setting like "Skip blank pages" or "Auto detect blanks" in their settings. Enable it once and you'll never have this problem again for that scanner. Look in the driver software (not the operating system's print/scan dialog).

For phone-based scanning apps (Adobe Scan, Microsoft Lens), blank page detection is usually on by default.

What about almost-blank pages?

If a page has just a page number or a single header line but is otherwise blank, automated blank detection often skips it. You'd have to manually inspect and remove. For a long document, the manual scan through thumbnails is still 5–10 minutes — much faster than the 50% saved file size payoff.

Bottom line

Identify blanks by scrolling thumbnails, list them comma-separated, run Remove Pages. For repeatable scans, fix the source: enable "skip blank pages" in your scanner's settings.

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