Unable to drag PDF thumbnails into keynote is HUGE PROBLEM

Gary,

On macOS Mojave 10.14.6 (18G95), if one opens a single-page, or multi-page PDF in Preview, and attempts to drag a selected PDF page thumbnail onto Keynote v9.1, it will fail — just as it does with Pages v8.1 with the following sheet descending in Keynote:

I have tried this with several different PDF in Preview, and the result is always the same. The solution is to copy the PDF thumbnail in Preview to the clipboard, and then in Keynote v9.1, simply perform a Paste operation. Alternatively, one must drag the thumbnail image to the Desktop, and subsequently drag and drop from the Desktop back into Keynote v9.1.

The same reproducible issue (and remedies) exists with drag/drop of Preview PDF thumbnails onto Keynote v9.1 in macOS High Sierra 10.13.6 (17G8030).

The above description also applies to Keynote v9.0 and Pages v8.0.

Ironically, though also based on Apple's PDFKit framework, the open source Skim PDF reader permits successful drag and drop of PDF thumbnails into Keynote v9.* and Pages v8.*.

None of us here have this problem, 25 different Macs tested it yesterday, so this is a local issue on your Mac.

Try resetting Keynote to see if it clears a corruption.

complete all of the following steps in the order listed:

1.    ensure you have a current backup of all your user files saved to a separate drive

2.    close all applications

3.    uninstall Keynote; for this procedure to work, an application removal tool must be used, App Delete has a free trial and works for this procedure. It can be downloaded from the developer’s website here: App Delete

4.    empty the Trash (Finder > Empty Trash)

5.    restart the Mac (Apple Menu > Restart) Immediately after the Apple bong sound, press the shift key on the keyboard, release shift when the Apple icon appears. Start up will take longer than usual as the Mac is performing a software repair of the start up drive.

6.    After the Mac is fully powered up, restart the Mac normally:  Apple Menu > Restart

7.    reinstall Keynote from the Mac App Store in the Applications folder

8.    Restart the Mac again

Part of my response above was omitted for some reason by the hosting software:

The open source Skim PDF reader permits drag and drop of PDF thumbnails directly onto Keynote 9 and 9.1, as well as Pages 8 and 8.1. Skim is using Apple's PDFKit framework, as used in Preview.

On macOS Mojave 10.14.6 (18G95), if one opens a single-page, or multi-page PDF in Preview, and attempts to drag a selected PDF page thumbnail onto Keynote v9.1, it will fail

As I stated earlier, there are no issues dragging PDF individual PDF pages into Keynote either with ourselves or any of our clients, so this is not an issue for every Mac user.

We author interactive PDF products daily and have never encountered this.

Three Macs in a local Apple reseller I visited this afternoon, also worked without issue.

To be clear, PDF's should be dragged on to the Navigator in Keynote, not on to a slide, of cource PDF security settings must allow opening the PDF.

Gary,

What can I say? I have three Macs here, two of which were clean installs and updates of Mojave and High Sierra. The Pages and Keynote applications are v8.1 and v9.1 respectively, and the drag and drop issue from Preview existed with prior point versions as well. The problem does not exist with Preview and Pages v5.6.2/Keynote v6.6.2 in El Capitan 10.11.6.

Others have been reporting the drag and drop issue from Preview into Pages (unsure of Keynote) on High Sierra and Mojave communities, so it is happening — even if not to you, and your customer installations. It makes no difference if the target document already exists, or has not been saved yet on the local drive.

I can only be grateful that I don't have some of the issues that others report here in the discussions, or I'd be out of business.

It's not unusual for users to have issues with Keynote that most other users have no problems with.

My introduction to the discussions many years ago was to report that Keynote would not launch on one of our Macs, someone suggested removing a specific app I had installed, it cured the problem right away.

I don't use Pages so can't comment on that.