Clipboard - paste a png on top of another png - not working anymore Tahoe

Is this what you are doing:

a) Have an image open in Preview

b) Select and Copy an icon in Finder

c) Paste in Preview

You were expecting the image you see in the icon to paste; but instead the generic png icon pastes.

I have experimented this and I get the same result. I have not tried this on previous versions, and I have no Mac running Sequoia or earlier at hand to compare. Could be a bug.

Report this using feedback - https://www.apple.com/feedback

Having looked at this again, I am now inclined to believe that the behavior you are experiencing is correct.

Let me try to explain.

When you copy a file in Finder, and paste in Preview, what is pasted is the file icon.

Now you may be saying "that's what I am doing, and I only get the generic png icon!".

So why do I think it's correct?

Select said png from your desktop and press Command-I. What do you see in Get Info?

The icon there IS the generic png icon. What is happening is that Finder identitifies (some) image file types,

and (depending on your settings) automatically displays a thumbnail of the image instead of its icon.

Now if you copy a file that has an icon - like, say, Safari.app, and then paste into Preview, you DO get the Safari icon;

or, if you copy an image file (or some other file) to which you assigned a custom icon, and then paste, you DO get the custom icon.

So while the behavior you were expecting would be nice, there is a logical reason why it is not working.

Finder copies the whole information about a file to the clipboard, and Preview when pasting this gets the icon

as an image.

FWIW, you are pasting a .png file onto a .png. To do what you want you have open the second .png in Preview, copy it, then paste it onto the target image…

Please explain in detail exactly what you are trying to achieve and the steps you are taking to achieve it.

Using your images…

True, So you need to follow my post. 😎