Hide thumbnails when reading a PDF on an iPad

0:01
In this video, I’m going to show you how you can remove the sidebar when viewing a multi page PDF on the iPad. Basically, the way that we do this is by opening it up in the books app. An advantage to this is that you can also open up a PDF across all your different devices when it’s on the books app. Let’s see what I mean. Let’s go over to my iPad.

0:25
Now first, let’s take a look at what happens when you open up a PDF on the iPad. Basically, when you open up a PDF, I’m going to go down to my files app here. And what I have here is a PDF. If we look at this, you’re going to see that we have all of the thumbnails for each page here on the left side. While that looks nice when you’re looking at the iPad, when it’s horizontal, it can take up some extra space. When you’re viewing the iPad in portrait mode. Maybe you do not want to see all these extra Pages here. What do you do? Well, in past versions of iPad OS, you used to be able to remove the sidebar. You can no longer do that with iPad os 15. That sidebar always shows. If I go up to these three horizontal lines. What it does is it allows me to open up my recent documents, my recent PDFs. That’s not what I want to do I want to hide the sidebar. Well, basically, the way that I found that works really well with this is by opening it up in the books app. And an advantage to it, as I mentioned in the introduction is when we open this up in the books app, we can now open it up across all of our different devices because it’s in the books app. So how do we do that? It’s pretty simple. Basically, all we have to do is go over to our share icon here. And when I share it, what I’m able to do is share it with the books app. When I select this, what it’s going to do is make a copy of that in the books app. And we can see now it is in my books app. So now when I’m viewing this, you’re gonna see it no longer has that sidebar. So how do I get to the thumbnails? Well, basically, all I do is just tap on it. And then down at the bottom, I can view all the different Pages. So if I wanted to go to a specific page, I can just click on it, and it takes me to that page.

2:22
Another advantage of the books app is I can go and bookmark different Pages, I can highlight text. And as I mentioned, what it does is it syncs it across all of your different devices. It also places it into a PDF category. When I close this book, we click on the left arrow here, I click on it. To close it, you’re going to see that I have all of these different categories in my library. One of the categories here is PDFs. So now all I need to do is just click on this. And we can see that my PDF is in there, I didn’t have to add it in there. So I can easily find all of my PDFs within the books app. So now that we have it in the books app on the iPad, let’s take a look at this on the iPhone, all I need to do is go over to my books app here I have it on my home screen, I tap on it. And then from here, what I do is I go over to the PDF category. So now I just go down to my library here.

3:21
This is where I’m going to be able to see all of my different collections. And one of the collections here is PDFs, I tap on it.

3:30
And you’re going to see I have my mouse tracks here. Same thing with the Mac. If I go and open up my books app, let’s go ahead and open it up.

3:41
And then we go over to my PDFs here, you’re going to see I have mouse tracks. All I did was just open that up in the books app on my iPad, and it added it to both my Mac and iPhone, and it placed it into the PDF collection.

4:01
So that’s how we can get rid of those thumbnails. When we’re looking at a multi page PDF on the iPad. We do this by opening up in the books app, we just go to the share icon and then share with the books app. From there. What you’re going to be able to do is open it up on all of your different devices as well. It’s going to place it in the PDF collection. So that’s how you can get rid of those little thumbnails when you’re viewing a PDF on the iPad.