Preview Only Exports One Image to PDF

Why Preview's Export as PDF only exports one image

When you open ten photos at once, Preview shows them in a single window with a thumbnail sidebar, which makes it look like one ten-page document. It isn't. Preview still treats each image as its own file, and File > Export as PDF is a document-level command. It acts on whichever thumbnail is highlighted, so you get a one-page PDF of that image and nothing else.

Selecting all ten thumbnails first doesn't fix it either. Export as PDF still writes one page. The neighbouring File > Export… item does change, to Export Selected Images, but that writes ten separate files into a folder rather than merging them. Nothing in that sheet will produce a multi-page PDF. You need a route that goes through the printing system or through Finder.

Route 1: select all in Preview's sidebar, then Print to PDF

This is the built-in route that merges properly and still lets you set the order by hand.

1. In Finder, select every image, right-click, and choose Open With > Preview. They should open in one window. If you get ten separate windows instead, open Preview > Settings > Images and set it to open groups of files in the same window, then try again.
2. If there's no thumbnail strip down the left, turn it on with View > Thumbnails.
3. Drag the thumbnails into the order you want. Cmd+R rotates a sideways one.
4. Click once in the sidebar, then press Cmd+A to select every thumbnail.
5. Press Cmd+P. Check in the preview pane on the left that it really pages through all your images and not just one — if it shows a single page, your thumbnail selection didn't take.
6. Set the paper size and orientation, then open the PDF pop-up menu at the bottom left and choose Save as PDF.

The catch is that this goes through the print pipeline. Every page is redrawn onto the paper you chose, scaled to fit inside the printable area, so your original image data doesn't survive intact.

Route 2: Finder's Create PDF Quick Action

If you don't care about page size and just want the images stitched together, Finder does it without opening an app at all.

1. Select the images in Finder.
2. Control-click the selection and choose Quick Actions > Create PDF. On some Macs it sits directly in the context menu; if you can't see it, look under More, or choose Customize at the bottom of the Quick Actions submenu and switch it on there.
3. A new PDF appears in the same folder, named after the first file you selected — which is also a quick way to check which image the Quick Action treated as page one. Rename it.

The thing that catches people out is the order. It comes from the order you selected the files in, not from where they sit in the window. Cmd+A builds that selection in the window's current sort order, which is why a Select All can come out looking arbitrary. Either Cmd-click the files one by one in the order you want, or sort the window by Name and rename the files 01, 02, 03 first. Beyond that you get no options: no page size, no margins, no choice between merged and separate.

Route 3: the converter on this page, when order and page size matter

Use the converter above when the built-in routes don't give you enough control. It runs entirely inside this browser tab, so nothing is uploaded, and there's no account or watermark.

• Drop the images in, then drag the thumbnails or use the arrow buttons to set the exact order. You can rotate or remove any of them first.
• Pick A4, US Letter, Legal, A3, A5, A6, Tabloid, or Match the image so each page is exactly the shape of the photo.
• Choose a margin of none, 6 mm, 13 mm or 19 mm, and whether images fit inside the page, fill it and crop, or stretch.
• Save one merged PDF, or separate PDFs in a ZIP.

JPG and PNG files are placed into the PDF without being decoded or re-compressed, which is why there's genuinely no quality loss for those two. The one exception is a photo whose EXIF says it is mirrored, usually a front-camera selfie: that has to be decoded and written again to come out the right way round, and the tool tells you when it does. If you only care about keeping the original JPEG and PNG data intact, the no-quality-loss page explains which files take that route. A batch stops at 200 images or 600 MB.

HEIC photos need nothing extra on a Mac

macOS decodes HEIC natively. Preview opens iPhone photos, and the Create PDF Quick Action handles them, with nothing installed and no conversion step first. If a Mac route works for JPG, it works for HEIC.

In the browser it's slightly different, because HEIC has no place inside the PDF format. Our converter decodes each file and re-encodes it once, as JPEG at high quality for photographs or PNG for anything with transparency. That's a single encode rather than a round trip through several apps, and you can point a batch straight at the HEIC to PDF tool. Camera RAW files (.dng, .cr2, .nef, .arw) aren't supported in the browser at all; Preview opens many of them, so export to JPEG there first.

The page-size question the Print route decides for you

Printing always asks for paper, and that changes what you get. A phone photo is roughly 4:3, A4 is roughly 1.41:1, so the image lands in the middle of the page with white bands above and below, plus the printer margin around the edge. That's correct for something you're going to print, and irritating for something you're going to email.

If you want the page to be the image and nothing else, use Match the image in the converter here and pick the resolution that suits: 72 or 96 dpi for screen, 150 or 300 if it's heading to a print shop. The converter here reads the EXIF orientation tag and applies it, so a sideways phone photo lands upright, and you can override it with the rotate control before converting. If a photo comes out rotated somewhere else, why images come out rotated in a PDF explains what the tag is doing.

Which route for which job

Two of those three already ship with your Mac, and for a quick merge of sensibly named files the Quick Action is the fastest thing on the machine. Reach for the converter when the order, the page size, the margins or separate output files matter, or when you want JPG and PNG to go in untouched.