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Why can't I copy images out of Pages?

I am a very heavy user of Pages and have been since it arrived as an alternative to other word processors. That said, over the past decade of using this app, there has been one major continuing annoyance I have experience with Pages... why can't we ever copy an image out of Pages to another app?


This is violation of what seems to me intuitive, that if I can paste an image into an app I should be able to copy an image out in some form.


In fact if you take a copy of the saved Pages file, change the file extension from .pages to .zip, you can uncompress the file and find all the images in the Pages file are stored as PDFs internally. It is not beyond Apple's capability to rasterize a PDF and allow (maybe via a 'Copy as...' menu item) extraction of the image to allow manipulation of the image before pasting it back in.


For now, I typically enlarge the images on screen and use a screen capture to rasterize the result, but it should be possible to do this...

Posted on Feb 8, 2023 8:28 AM

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Posted on Feb 8, 2023 9:12 AM

I would in the strongest terms, not recommend that you unzip a Pages document.


Any image in a Pages document can be clicked for selection, copied to the clipboard, and pasted into another document capable of receiving images from the clipboard. This works between Pages v12.2.1 and LibreOffice Writer v7.5, by example.


Also, with an image selected, you can choose the Pages Image tab and single-click on the image icon under File info, and drag that image file to the filesystem or onto the Apple Preview application icon in the Dock and it will open it.


Pages was not designed to allow you to directly drag document objects out of it from the document body. If you have an issue with that, then use the Feedback menu item from its application menu to communicate directly with the product team about a new feature.

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Feb 8, 2023 9:12 AM in response to Juan Cabanela

I would in the strongest terms, not recommend that you unzip a Pages document.


Any image in a Pages document can be clicked for selection, copied to the clipboard, and pasted into another document capable of receiving images from the clipboard. This works between Pages v12.2.1 and LibreOffice Writer v7.5, by example.


Also, with an image selected, you can choose the Pages Image tab and single-click on the image icon under File info, and drag that image file to the filesystem or onto the Apple Preview application icon in the Dock and it will open it.


Pages was not designed to allow you to directly drag document objects out of it from the document body. If you have an issue with that, then use the Feedback menu item from its application menu to communicate directly with the product team about a new feature.

Why can't I copy images out of Pages?

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