Pasting Graphics Into PDFs in Preview

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how you can paste a graphic over a PDF using Preview on your Mac. 

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Now let's say you have a PDF file, maybe it's a business report of some kind, and you want to put a graphic on top of it like maybe a company logo or watermark or just some sort of annotation that's not included there. A special arrow or something like that. Well, at first it doesn't seem like there is anyway to do that.

 For instance, here I've got a report. I'm going to double click and it will open up in Preview. Then I've got this graphic here that's a logo. If I drag and drop it here it doesn't work. No matter where I try to drag and drop it to it won't put it there. If I double click and open it up in Preview I can see I have the image there. So let's do a Select All and then a Copy. You would think if I switched to the PDF here and Paste that I can. But it doesn't even allow me to paste there. It doesn't recognize I have anything that can be pasted in. So the obvious methods don't work. But you can still do this. You just have to know the trick.

The important thing to realize is that Preview is actually two apps in one. One is a PDF viewer and annotator and that's what we've got here in this window because we opened up a PDF. In this window we have an image and the other thing that Preview can be is an image viewer and an annotator. In this case it is a png file but could be a jpg or any other image file format types. The two really don't mix inside of Preview. But you can, kind of, use this trick to take this image here and bring it into the PDF. 

So note that this image is semi-transparent. This area here that's in gray is transparent so you just have a logo that will fall nicely on top of anything. But you could do this with a jpeg image which would just be a full box all filled in. It doesn't really matter. But if you do want transparency you have to have a transparent image like a logo watermark like I have here. Now whichever type of image you have you can Select All, like we've already done, and you can Copy. But the trick is not to switch to the PDF window yet. Instead Paste right here. When you paste notice you get a second copy of it on top of the image. If I move it around you could see I've got these little handles here. I can actually drag them and resize this. This is kind of like an object or another layer on top of the image. If you think of an app like Photoshop it will have multiple layers. You don't really see that in Preview but you kind of get it, sometimes in cases like this. 

So when I pasted the image on top of itself I actually got an object not another image. If I were to now Copy this image then I could take that copy and I can go to the PDF window and I can paste it in. It will paste in, you could see it pastes it right down here, and I can move it to where I want and I could even resize it and stick it where I want. Now I've got this image as kind of an annotation on this PDF. If I were to now Save it I would still have it there. So I'll do a Command S to save and Close. If I open it up it is still an object there. So if I want it to be permanent what I would need to do is go to File, and then Export as a PDF like that, or go to Print and then print it as a PDF and that would kind of get rid of the object and just permanently imprint it on the resulting document. 

Now if you need this graphic to be more than one page you can actually select it, do Command C, go to another page and then paste it here. Sometimes you have to click on the page to make sure it has a target. So if I click here and I do Command V to paste it does nothing. But if I click on the page, like that, now it will give it a target. You could also drag this around. Resize it. If you have a trackpad you can use two fingers and actually rotate this as well. It only works with a trackpad. So there are a variety of different things you can do. 

Now if you need to do this a lot you can make it easier to do. You can create a sample document that will hold your watermarks, logos, and other things and have them ready to go. To do that you can use any app. I'm actually going to use TextEdit just to show you how simple it can be. I'm going to create a new document in TextEdit. It is just a plain text document. I'm going to Export as PDF. It is just a blank document now. I'll call this Objects. That's going to be on the Desktop as well. Now, I can get out of TextEdit and go into this blank PDF here. If I have copied this logo, either from an existing PDF or go back to this graphic, Select All, Copy, Paste and then copy the object again. Then I can Paste it here into my blank page. I can paste other things here as well. So other watermarks, variations of logos, arrows and circles and all sorts of things. You could just fill this up with all sorts of objects that you could use in the future. 

So let's say I'm back here with this report. I want to put a logo or watermark on it. I go back to my Objects.pdf file I've got there. I can select this, Copy, go in here, click on the page, and then Paste it in. Now move it around. So if you need to do this often with the same graphics it is pretty easy to have a pdf file like this Objects.pdf around where you can get to it and then Copy and Paste from it. Of course it is always best if it's a document that you're creating, say you've done it in Pages or Word or in Design or something like that, that you actually put the graphics in place in the authoring tool that you're making it with instead of waiting until afterwards when it is already a PDF. But in some situations you're given a PDF and it is just easier to put the graphic on it rather than asking the creator of the document for the original source file. 

I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.