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Preview not saving annotations

Preview is not saving my annotations of PDFs that students submit. It saves one or two and then stops. Apparently security settings create the problem but it's not feasible to tell the students to make sure that they disable security -- too many of them will forget. That's a problem. The technology should reduce barriers not add them. There was not problem with the annotations until I got my new mac at the end of 2021. Before that annotations worked without having to tell students to adjust security settings. I can see that if I open the files in Adobe I can save the annotations so it's an Apple Preview problem not a PDF problem. Unless there's some sort of fix for this (searching the discussions suggests that Apple does not see changing this as a priority) I will have to look at this as Apple broke Preview and I need to use Adobe to edit student papers. If there's a better solution I'd love to hear it.

Posted on Jul 14, 2022 10:56 AM

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5 replies

Jul 15, 2022 1:11 PM in response to jrickert

Hello, jrickert.


To start us off, please take a look at this article that explains how annotating .pdf files works and confirm these are the steps being taken: Annotate a PDF in Preview on Mac - Apple Support.


If yes, let us know a bit more about the Macs in question. Which ones are being used? What macOS versions are running?


Let us know a bit more and we'd be happy to investigate further. Take care!



Jul 24, 2022 12:07 PM in response to Gena_D

Yes. That's the annotation that I've been doing. My MacBook Pro 14in, 2021 is running Monterey 12.0.1.

The students are on a variety of machines and submit a PDF.

As noted before. Annotations worked fine on my previous Mac. The problem of disappearing annotations popped up with my purchase of the new Mac late last year.

Preview not saving annotations

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