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Apple Preview

The macOS PDF viewer and markup editor that ships with every Mac.

Jobs View Sign Edit Protect Merge Convert Compress

Visit Apple Preview

Opens the vendor's own site.

Jobs covered

Open a task to see exactly what the vendor documentation supports.

View Browse all view tools

opening PDFs and images in the Preview app on Mac, by double-clicking a file or using File Open, changing how documents are shown in the Preview window and getting information about the files

Sign Browse all sign tools

a drawn signature

Edit Browse all edit tools

annotate, not existing text

Protect Browse all protect tools

password protection and permissions for opening, printing, copying and annotating, in the Mac app

Merge Browse all merge tools

combining PDF pages and documents in the Preview app on Mac, where the Apple Preview User Guide states that you can add individual pages from one PDF to another and merge the entire contents of two or more PDFs by opening the PDFs, choosing View Thumbnails and dragging thumbnails from the sidebar of one PDF to the sidebar of the other, adding pages at the end of a document or between pages and dragging thumbnails to reorder them, or by dragging a PDF icon from the Finder onto the sidebar of an open document to add a whole PDF, and where its companion page documents inserting a page from a file or a blank page after the current page, moving pages by dragging, deleting selected pages with the Delete key, and moving a page from one PDF to another by dragging thumbnails, with the notes that deleting a page also removes all annotations on it, that a new PDF can be created by dragging thumbnails from a PDF sidebar to the desktop, and that changes to a Preview document are saved automatically, so the original PDFs should be duplicated first with File Duplicate to keep copies

Convert Browse all convert tools

exporting a PDF or image as another file type, and converting between image formats such as HEIC, JPEG, JPEG-2000, PNG and TIFF, in the Mac app

Compress Browse all compress tools

reducing PDF file size through export options and the Reduce File Size Quartz filter, with possible quality loss and variable results, in the Mac app

Where your files are processed

No server involved

A local Apple application that opens files on the device. No account, no upload step, and no vendor service in the path.

Architectural rather than a vendor promise: a local Apple application that opens files on the device, and the help pages describe no upload, account or server step. The iOS signature feature can hand off to a nearby Apple device, which is local peer-to-peer.

What it does

Preview is the PDF and image viewer built into macOS, and Apple now documents a Preview app on iPhone and iPad. On the Mac it reads and searches PDFs, reorders and combines pages, fills forms, applies signatures and marks up with shapes, notes, highlights and text boxes.

Apple documents a Redaction Selection tool that removes selected text and becomes permanent when the document is closed. It cannot edit or reflow existing PDF text.

Best for

Mac users who want a zero-install, zero-cost way to read, sign, lightly annotate, combine and occasionally redact PDFs.

Worth knowing

Apple states you cannot edit PDF text in Preview, and redaction is documented only for macOS - the iPhone and iPad Preview guides list highlighting, shapes and signatures but no redaction tool. Apple also warns that table-of-contents entries linking to redacted text are not removed.

Details, and where each comes from

Vendor statements, our own reading of their pages, and the things nobody has established yet, each answered separately. Where we have not confirmed something it says so rather than guessing, and a row nobody has established is greyed out.

Versions covered
macOS · iOS
Website
support.apple.com
Requires an account
No
Watermark on the free tier
Not verified
Maximum file size
Not verified
Batch processing
No
Data residency
Self-hosted
Open source
Not verified
Self-hostable
Not verified
Licence
Not verified
Redaction
Removes the content
Programmatic access
None
Last availability check
Responded in 435 ms 21 October 2026

Checked automatically by our own runner, not reported by the vendor. 100% of our last 30 checks got a response.

What the redaction verdict rests on

From the vendor's own documentation, read 22 September 2026. Not tested by us.

“You can change the redaction as you edit, but once you close the document, the redaction becomes permanent.”

What that does not establish

Apple’s own guide, not a test we ran - and we could not test it, because Preview is macOS-only and our probe runs on Windows. Apple documents a specific limit on the same page: table-of-contents entries that link to redacted text are not removed.

https://support.apple.com/guide/preview/annotate-a-pdf-prvw11580/mac

What the vendor says

Claims are labelled rather than repeated as fact. Where we have checked something ourselves, it says so and shows when. Checked means we read the vendor's own page and it says what we recorded - not that we tested the behaviour, unless the note says we did.

  • “You can change the redaction as you edit, but once you close the document, the redaction becomes permanent.”

    Checked by us - the source says this Read 22 September 2026

    Confirmed verbatim. The rendered page says, under Redaction Selection: "Select text to permanently remove it from view.

    You can change the redaction as you edit, but once you close the document, the redaction becomes permanent." The claim is the second sentence exactly. The first sentence is the one that matters more to a reader and is worth noting: the tool is described as removing the text 'from view', which is weaker language than removal from the file, and the permanence it promises is a property of closing the document rather than of the redaction itself.

    We have not tested whether the removed text survives in the content stream, so this is recorded as the vendor's description and not as a verified removal.

    Standing: Re-read and matched byte for byte

    Check it yourself: the source, the SHA-256, and how we checked
    Read
    https://support.apple.com/guide/preview/annotate-a-pdf-prvw11580/mac
    From
    the text a browser renders
    SHA-256
    629d8e6acb7025fdd0f3029a900ec268ad15ea4b5a9818900d520e55c0a63fbe

    How we checked

    Re-verified verbatim on 2026-09-22: https://support.apple.com/guide/preview/annotate-a-pdf-prvw11580/mac re-rendered in headless Chrome with scripts/render-page.mjs and the claim's wording found in the rendered text. Originally verified on 2026-09-21. sourceHash is the SHA-256 of the re-rendered text, held as rv-support-apple-com-guide-preview-annotate-a-pdf-prvw11580-m-1e4e0533.txt.

    What this hash proves, and what it does not

  • “The editing tools in the Markup toolbar are ideal for collaborating-use them to suggest changes to a PDF and to respond to suggestions.”

    Checked by us - the source says this Read 22 September 2026

    Confirmed verbatim, with one wording note: the page has an em dash where the claim has a hyphen, which is a transcription difference rather than a substantive one. The sentence immediately before it is the one that frames the claim, and it is the honest limit - "Although you can't edit the text of a PDF in Preview, you can use the markup tools to provide feedback or write down something you want to remember." So the collaboration described is markup-based review rather than document editing, and the claim read alone would not tell a reader that.

    This is the second Preview claim in the index, after the redaction one recorded by test earlier.

    Standing: Re-read and matched byte for byte

    Check it yourself: the source, the SHA-256, and how we checked
    Read
    https://support.apple.com/guide/preview/annotate-a-pdf-prvw11580/mac
    From
    the text a browser renders
    SHA-256
    629d8e6acb7025fdd0f3029a900ec268ad15ea4b5a9818900d520e55c0a63fbe

    How we checked

    Re-verified verbatim on 2026-09-22: https://support.apple.com/guide/preview/annotate-a-pdf-prvw11580/mac re-rendered in headless Chrome with scripts/render-page.mjs and the claim's wording found in the rendered text. Originally verified on 2026-09-21. sourceHash is the SHA-256 of the re-rendered text, held as rv-support-apple-com-guide-preview-annotate-a-pdf-prvw11580-m-1e4e0533.txt.

    What this hash proves, and what it does not

Each claim is quoted from the vendor's own pages. This section describes what we have and have not checked - it is not a judgement about anyone.

Sponsorship is distribution, not an endorsement or a promise of search rankings, AI citations, traffic, or sales. This listing is a free entry, compiled from published sources.

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Related reading

How this record was put together

Editorial review.
No editor has signed this record off. That is not the same as nothing having been checked, and the lines below say what has.
Source reading.
2 claims taken from the vendor's own pages, read between 22 September 2026 and 22 September 2026.
Website availability.
The vendor's site was last checked on 21 October 2026.
Behaviour testing.
We ran this ourselves. The file handling was watched directly.

Sources: support.apple.com Preview guides for macOS, iPad and iPhone, including annotate-a-pdf and fill-out-and-sign-a-pdf-form. Vendor documentation, not independently verified.