The ground state, zero-temperature magnetization process, critical behaviour and isothermal entropy change of the mixed-spin Ising model on a decorated triangular lattice in a magnetic field are exactly studied after performing the generalized decorationiteration mapping transformation. It is shown that both the inverse and conventional magnetocaloric effect can be found near the absolute zero temperature. The former phenomenon can be found in a vicinity of the discontinuous phase transitions and their crossing, while the latter one occurs in some paramagnetic phases due to a spin frustration to be present at zero magnetic field. The inverse magnetocaloric effect can also be detected slightly above continuous phase transitions following the power-law dependence | − ∆S min iso | ∝ h n , where n depends basically on the ground-state spin ordering.