Paste image from the clipboard into a PDF in Preview

The question title describes what should be a common/simple operation? But I can not find the options to do it : After having copied an image to the clipboard -even from Preview itself - when right-clicking _nothing happens- ie. no context menu. And in Edit we only see these options:

enter image description here

Is it the case that one can not paste images atop an existing Preview window? What are simple alternatives?


You can open a new file with that image in it. Copy your image to the clipboard and go to the File menu. Under that, you'll see the option "Open from clipboard". This opens a new pdf with that image in it. You can then edit the image and include text by going to Tools/Annotate. You can't add this image to an existing pdf but you can merge 2 or more pdf by using the free app PDFSam, which stands for PDF split and merge. So if I had a large PDF and i wanted to add an image i'd split the large PDF at the location I wanted to add the image. Then I'd merge the 3 in the correct order.


You CAN do it. At least this is what worked for me on MacOS Catalina and Preview Version 11.

  1. Copy onto the Clipboard, the image that you want to paste on your PDF page.
  2. Go to Preview -> File -> New from Clipboard.
  3. This will basically create a new Preview document with your image in it. Now click anywhere on the image, press Cmd+A to select the entire image, press Cmd+C to copy and then (this is the crucial part!!) press Delete to delete the image.
  4. You will see a blank screen in Preview since you have deleted the image. Press Cmd+V and your image will reappear, but now, in a different format that can be copy-pasted across Preview documents.
  5. Finally, select this 'new format' image using Cmd+A, copy it using Cmd+C and navigate to your PDF document and paste using Cmd+V.

Voila! You can paste the image anywhere in your PDF document and on any page and you can resize and edit it just like you can with shapes. I think Apple didn't intend this to happen and I hope they don't read this and change this feature :P


Based on @Allan's comment that Preview does not support PDF's. Preview does support some basic image editing facilities: so I am making image copies of the pdf pages and then super-imposing the other images on top of those images. This is working for my present needs.