Pasting images in Preview

I read this trick a while ago and used it successfully albeit it takes some practice and patience.

Open the image you want to paste as its own document (in its own window) in Preview. Select All, Cut, Paste immediately in the same document. Click on the image and Copy. Then go to the other document and Paste. You can paste multiple times in a row.

To really embed the pasted pictures in the destination document and make them unremovable afterwards, "print" the document as PDF even if it's already a PDF document.

It does work, I use it all the time. You have to use the right format for the source image, PNG works best, JPG is OK, but do not use PDF. As I said, it takes some practice and patience.

Here I have a PNG image I want to put in the PDF file

Select All

Cut

Paste, click on it (sometimes twice), Copy

Switch document, Paste. Voilà!

All you are doing is pasting an image annotation over the original PDF content in Preview. If opened in Adobe Acrobat Reader DC, the selected content is identified as a Stamp annotation and one can change the opacity of it so that document text appears through it.

And yes, if one prints to PDF and Saves as PDF, the image annotation layer is flattened into the PDF and is no longer editable.

Tested: macOS Sonoma 14.0.

Hey, You could download/screenshot any image which you want to paste, then open that image in preview. You ahve to select it again once you open and copy and paste it in the same pdf, then you can use that image to paste in the required pdf.

It is exactly expalined in this link for more clarification. https://youtu.be/dDJmLNj00n8

If you pay for a PDF Editor, you can alter the existing original PDF content with images. Apple's Preview is not a PDF Editor and will repulse attempts to make it one.