How To Merge PDF Files On Your Mac

There are several ways to merge PDF files on your Mac. A simple Quick Action in the Finder will do it quickly, but using Preview gives you lots of options to arrange and customize the resulting PDF document. You can even split a PDF file with the same techniques.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how you can merge PDF files on your Mac. 
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A common question Mac users have is how to merge two or more PDF files into a single file. It's actually really easy to do. But you've got more options if you want to do something more specific. So, if you just want to take two files and just create one PDF from them it's actually pretty easy and you don't need any software at all. You can just do it in the Finder. 
This is using macOS Sonoma so make sure you've got the most recent version of macOS and then select the files you want. Here I've got a file called Newsletter.pdf. If I hit the spacebar just for a quick look I can see it just has got two pages in here. Just a sample newsletter. Here's another one called report.pdf. It's also just got two pages here. These are just pages, just templates, that have exported as pdf's as examples. Let's say I wanted to merge these into one pdf. What I could do is I could select one and then select the other. You can do that by using Shift and clicking. That will select a range but also you could do it with Command click and that could select a file that is not contiguous like that. 
So once you've got the files selected that you want to merge then you want to bring up the Context Menu. You can do that using Control Click or two-finger click on a trackpad, right click on a mouse. Just do that with one of the files that's already selected. Then it brings up the Context Menu and look for Quick Actions. One of the Quick Actions you should see, maybe the only one, is Create PDF. So let's select that. That will create a new PDF using the name of the first one that was selected and appending a number to it. We can rename now to something else, so I call it Merged. Now if I use Quick Look to view the PDF I can see it's got the two pages from the first document and the two pages from the second document all wrapped up in one single PDF file. 
Now there are other ways to get to that Create PDF function if you don't want to use the Context Menu. One way is if you go to View and then Show Preview. You can bring up the Preview here in any view in the Finder. It's usually there in the Column View by default. But you can bring it up in List View and Icon View as well. Then at the bottom you're going to see Quick Actions, like Create PDF. There's not much room here for many Quick Actions so if you have other ones it might push Create PDF off the List. But if you click More and Customize then it will take you to System Settings and you can see checks next to all the items that are there in Quick Actions. Now you can click and drag one to the top to give it priority. You can also check and uncheck which ones you want. Notice these are all checked but they weren't showing up because they're all for images. So since we didn't have an image file we didn't have things that Convert Image, Markup, Rotate Left, and Trim which is for video files there. We just saw Create PDF so it didn't really matter. Once you've got that setup you can use Create PDF right here and it will do it for you instead of bringing up the Context Menu. 
So you can also use this for merging more than two PDF's. So I can select these two but also, say, this one here which is three pages of text. So let's go and do that. I'm going to use the Command Key to select all three. When I use any that will activate PDF, like that, then I get this file here. If I look at it now I can see it's got all of the pages from all three files. Note that order is important. If I select this file first and then this file and then this one it's going to merge them in that order. So now when I click the button you can see it is using that name from the first one selected. When I Quick Look I can see it has the document with three text pages first and then the report and then the newsletter. 
Now using a Quick Action instead of the Finder is the fastest way to merge PDF's. But if you want something more specific, a little more control over things, then you can use Preview instead. So let's open this up in Preview. You can double click it if Preview is your default app for opening up PDF's. By default that's how it should be setup on your Mac. However, if you've used another app and that's taken over the default app you can Control Click on it and say Open With and then Preview. So in order to actually merge files you need to be able to see the Thumbnails to the left. So click on this little icon here and choose Thumbnails or alternatively choose View and then Thumbnails. You're going to see the Thumbnails here. You see all the different pages. So now you can add another PDF to this using the Plus Button at the bottom left. You can see you can Insert Page from a File.
Now before we actually do that let's realize what we're doing here. We've opened up newsletter.pdf. If we insert another page we're actually adding to newsletter.pdf. You may not want to do that. You might want to leave newsletter.pdf alone and create a new file that merges various pdf files. So the ways to do that are many. You can, for instance, select a file here and then in the Finder go to Duplicate and it creates a new one. So we can rename this one Merged. I'm going to show you more ways to do this in a minute. But for now we've created this new pdf that's a copy of the newsletter.pdf file. That's great. This is the one we're going to merge into. So I'm going to double click on it to open it up in Preview. I'm going to click the Plus Button and choose Insert Page from File and I'm going to go and add Report to this one. So I'm going to select Open and you can see it actually imports the pages from that document into this one. But notice where I put them. I put them between page 1 and page 2 of the newsletter. So let's Undo there. Instead let's get more specific and show it exactly where we want to Insert. 
We're going to select page 2 indicating we want to insert after page 2 instead of page 1 or the default indicating we want to insert after page 1. So now when we insert page from file and we select Report we get the two new pages added at the end. I can continue to add pages. I can select the last page here and continue to insert other documents as well. Or if I decide I want to insert one between these two I can select page 2 and it will insert pages between 2 and 3. 
But notice that you can also use the Thumbnails here to drag things around. So I could select this page here and drag it up, for instance, and put it at the top. Or let me Undo that and I can select this one and Command Click to select these two pages and drag up to the top here and change the order. So Preview allows you to organize the pages after you've brought together multiple documents. 
But you can also use the same technique between two different pdf files. So let's do what we did before and create a Copy of newsletter.pdf. I'm going to use File, Duplicate. Notice Command D is the shortcut there. Change this to Merged. Now I'm going to double click to open this second file, report.pdf. I can actually go to the Thumbnails in report.pdf and drag one or both, I'm going to Command Click to select both. Drag it over to the first document here. I can place it exactly where I want. So I'll place it here at the end. So you can see by just dragging and dropping from one to the other I can merge two documents. I didn't have to select both pages here. I could have select just one and brought that into this document. So it gives you a lot more control over exactly what's being merged and where. 
Now the weird step here is duplicating the file before you actually do the merge so you're not changing the original file. But there are other ways to handle that. For instance, we can double click on newsletter.pdf to open it up. So now I'm looking at the original. But now I can go to File, and I could Duplicate. This creates a second copy here. So now I can work with this copy and I can actually Close this one. So you can duplicate the file inside the app. 
Another way to do it is to open up the original document, go to File and hold the Option Key down. Duplicate changes to Save As. So now you can select a new name for this, like that, and you've only ever had the one window open. But notice I've got the original there sitting all by itself, that's not opened and we're not going to be changing it, and this new one, and I can now go and add to this new one or I can open another document and drag and drop pages into. it. 
A third way to do this comes in handy if you don't want to use all the pages from the original document. So, let's go into newsletter.pdf here. Let's say I just want to use the first page from this one and merge it with some others. I can select this first page and Copy, Command C. Then I can go to File and say New From Clipboard. This creates a new untitled document and I could see here I've just got that first page. You can even select multiple pages. So if this had ten pages I could have selected page 1, 4, and 6 and then copied those and said New from Clipboard. So now I've got this Untitled, Unsaved document and I can proceed to insert new pages from other documents or open other documents and drag and drop pages into it. 
I like this technique because it feels kind of natural after you've done it once or twice. Remember you don't have to go and scroll through to select all the pages. If you have a 100 page document you can simply select one of the pages and use Command A to select All of them. Then Command C for copy. Then a quick Command N for New From Clipboard. Now you've got an Untitled, Unsaved document that has all those pages in it ready to merge some new pages in. 
Plus I know I'm going to get some people asking about what about Splitting documents. You don't want to merge them. You just want to separate pages. Well, this technique works for that as well. If you just wanted to have a document with page 2 you can select page 2 here and then Command C to copy, Command N for New From Clipboard and now you've got a document with a single page in it ready to save out. You can do that with multiple pages as well and continue to go back to the original document, copy pages from it, Command N to create New From Clipboard and you can see now I've got these two new untitled documents here. So you can use all of this to split pdf's as well as to merge them. 
So there are a whole bunch of different ways to merge and manipulate the pages in pdf's from very simple to a little more complex but with a lot more flexibility. I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 12 Responses to “How To Merge PDF Files On Your Mac”

Norm Probst

10 months ago

I have been opening pdf doc in Preview and drag & droping other pdf files from the finder. Rearranging or deleting pages after if necessary. You provide other ways to merge pdf's which are faster. Thanks for a great video for something I use a lot.

Celtic(C4)

Thank you for sharing. I will definitely use this information.

Fiona McG

Thanks, Gary. Copy + and New From Clipboard will be a new option for me. This is a VERY helpful video on merging and splitting pdfs.

Steve C

Quick Look is your default action? At about 3:18, it appears that you click (on what?) to bring up a file in Quick Look rather than Preview. I want to do the same! Currently a double left click on my trackpad brings up Preview. How can I change to Quick Look?
Great video and I'm not even 4 minutes into it yet! Thanks!

Gary Rosenzweig

Steve: I'm pressing the spacebar to bring up Quick Look at about that time. Just select a file, press spacebar.

Mike Cliff

For years I have been using the techniques of dragging and dropping into the thumbnails although it works it can become quite tedious. Thank you so much for all the different ways you have shown in this video.

An update to my previous comment: I think I found my answer. The Spacebar! I have monthly reports to compile, so this video has been a game-changer for me, since I've been using only a fraction of the power of Preview and Quick Look to manipulate my PDFs. That will change. Thanks!

Dave P

9 months ago

So helpful! I used this just today to combine a bunch of hand written notes (which I scanned into a PDF using my iPhone and the Files app), and a screen shot. I used the Preview app to export the screen shot as a PDF, then again to do the merge.

Michael

Gary. This was a revelation. Soooo useful. Thank you.

Joel

3 months ago

Nothing I do imports the other pdfs in file name order. Are they being imported randomly, or by something other than file name? It's not automation if I combine 24 pdfs and then have to put them in order manually anyway.

What am I missing?

Joel: Not sure what the order could be. Maybe try selecting them one-by-one in the Finder (Command+click to add to the selection) to see if it obeys the order in which you add them. Experiment with things like that.

Erm, it was user error.

They WERE in order, and the one superfluous file that was throwing me off was one I had added to one file, then added THAT file to the master, so the suspect file was in there twice, but only 'cause I did it that way.

D'oh. Thanks for the tip, though.

How To Merge PDF Files On Your Mac

Comments: 12 Responses to “How To Merge PDF Files On Your Mac”

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