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:
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.
- Copy onto the Clipboard, the image that you want to paste on your PDF page.
- Go to Preview -> File -> New from Clipboard.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.