Skip to content

How to Merge PDFs on a Mac

Your Mac can already do this with Preview — and sometimes the browser is still faster. Both ways are below; both are free.

Add PDF files to merge

Select two or more PDF files

or drag and drop files here

The quick way: right here in the browser

  1. Drag your PDFs from Finder into the drop zone above (or click Choose files).
  2. Order them with the arrows — the top file comes first.
  3. Click Merge, then Download. The file saves to your Downloads folder.

Files are processed on your Mac in the browser tab — nothing is uploaded. This was built and tested on macOS in Chrome, Firefox and the Safari engine.

The built-in way: Preview

  1. Open the first PDF in Preview.
  2. Show the sidebar: View → Thumbnails.
  3. Drag the other PDF files from Finder into the sidebar, at the position where their pages should go.
  4. Use File → Export as PDF… to save the combined document.

Preview is excellent — but it has two traps. If you skip “Export as PDF” and just close the window, macOS quietly saves the changes into the original first file. And dragging files into the sidebar at the wrong nesting level inserts pages inside another page's group. If you've ever been bitten by either, you know why the browser version exists.

Which to use

  • Preview — when you also want to delete or rearrange individual pages while merging.
  • This page — when you want file-level merging with a clear order list and an untouched original.

Merge PDFs on other devices