How to Delete Pages From a PDF on Mac

Preview can strip pages out of any PDF you're allowed to edit — no Acrobat, no upload-your-contract-to-a-random-website. The whole job is a sidebar, a click, and the Delete key. Here's how to remove one page or twenty, and how to get pages back if you cut too deep.

Delete a page in Preview

1. Open the PDF in Preview (double-click it — Preview is the default for PDFs on most Macs).
2. Choose View → Thumbnails so the page sidebar appears on the left.
3. Click the thumbnail of the page you want gone.
4. Press Delete, or choose Edit → Delete.
5. Press Cmd+S to save the change into the file.

That's it. The page numbers in the sidebar renumber instantly, so what was page 7 becomes page 6. If you don't see an Open-with-Preview option because PDFs open in another app on your Mac, right-click the file and choose Open With → Preview — everything here works regardless of your default PDF app.

Delete many pages at once

Selection in the sidebar works like Finder:

• Cmd-click thumbnails to add individual pages to the selection — page 3, page 9, page 14.
• Shift-click to select a continuous range: click page 5, Shift-click page 20, and everything between is selected.
• Cmd+A selects every page (useful with Cmd-click to deselect the few you want to keep).

Press Delete once and the whole selection disappears. For huge documents, View → Contact Sheet shows a full-window grid of pages, and the same selection and Delete tricks work there.

One limit: Preview won't let you delete every page — a PDF must keep at least one.

Undo, recover, and stay safe

Before you save, Cmd+Z brings deleted pages straight back. After you save, you still have options:

• File → Revert To → Browse All Versions… shows earlier saved versions of the file (Preview autosaves as you work) and can restore one.
• If the file came from email or a download, the original copy is still in your Downloads folder or the message.

Working on a contract or anything irreplaceable? Do the safe thing first: File → Duplicate (or Cmd+D on the file in Finder) and cut pages from the copy. If Delete is greyed out, the PDF has edit permissions locked — you'd need the owner password to change it.

Extract pages instead of deleting the rest

Sometimes "delete 19 pages" is really "keep page 4". There's a faster move: drag the thumbnail of the page you want out of the sidebar and drop it on the Desktop or into a Finder folder. Preview creates a new single-page PDF from it, leaving the original document untouched — a clean way to pull a signed page or a single chart out of a long document. Need a multi-page excerpt? Duplicate the document (File → Duplicate), then delete everything except the pages you want using the Cmd-click trick above.

A note on file size: deleting pages doesn't always shrink a PDF as much as you'd expect, because fonts and shared resources stay embedded. If the goal is a smaller attachment, trim the pages and then export a compressed copy as a second step.

Related: rearrange instead of delete

If the pages are fine but the order is wrong, don't delete anything — drag thumbnails up and down the sidebar to reorder them, or pull pages in from another file entirely. The sidebar is also how you rotate sideways scans and stitch documents together; see how to merge PDFs on Mac for the full drag-and-drop workflow. Once you're comfortable with thumbnail selection, most PDF surgery on a Mac takes under a minute.