Cannot drag and drop PDF pages in Yosemite Preview App

Same issue.

1. Multiple reboots did not work
2. PDFpenpro did not work.
3. No updates shown in App Store

Finally what worked for me is a full shutdown of my MacBook. When it booted back up there was a weird "installation bar" with no indication of what it was doing.

Now... everything works.

Ditto here. Earlier today I was able to drag and drop pages from one pdf to a second pdf using thumbnail view, something I do dozens of times daily, and then out of the blue Preview totally locked up. It was completely unusable. Reloading Preview did not help. Rebooting my MBP brought Preview back to a state where it was usable but I still can't drag and drop pages from one file to another. I don't know what's going on here but it's a royal PITA.

Thanks for your suggestion Old Toad. Tried it, and when I tried to drag a single page from one pdf to a second pdf in Thumbnail view Preview locked up and became unusable. I'm open to any further suggestions. Fortunately I've got a Plan B available, but I use Preview so much it's critical to me. It ***** that Yosemite seems to have introduced what appears to be a bug in what up to now has been a pretty bulletproof app.

Same problem here. Can't merge pdf files with drag and drop, can't reorder pages from thumbnail view. I used to do this all the time before upgrading to Yosemite. Old Toad's suggestion of deleting the contents of ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.Preview seems to work around the bug for a single drag and drop event. It is not a permanent fix. This is really frustrating. I do not believe that using acrobat pro to re-save the file is a legitimate fix.

Have you run any "cleaning" or "optimizing" apps on your Mac or have any antivirus software installed?

Boot into the Recovery volume (boot with the Command + R keys held down), select Disk Utility and repair both the disk permissions and the disk. Reboot normally and try again.

If the above fails reboot into the Recovery volume and reinstall the system. Repair disk permissions afterward.

Also, as a test, log into another user account on your Mac and see if the problem persists there. If it does then it's a system wide issue. If not, it's an account issue.

Old Toad ... Thanks for your efforts to help us deal with this problem. Since I last posted re: this topic Preview has been behaving itself for me. I've been able to both copy and paste pages between files and I've been able to reorder pages within a .pdf file. I can't explain why it didn't work before and now seems to be working. I've done nothing except shut down and re-start my MBP. I'm not running any antivirus or system altering apps. This is very weird behavior. There must be gremlins at work here. Nonetheless, I hope 10.10.1 resolves this for everyone.

No cleaning app or antivirus software running. Disk repair did not find any errors. Disk permissions fixed a few unrelated things. Rebooted. Tried it in another account. Same result: can't drag and drop thumbnails from two different pdf files. I'd rather not have to reinstall the OS, since this is my personal computer with a setup that I don't want to throw away needlessly. I'm not convinced that reinstalling from a time machine backup would fix this issue either.

The behaviour I'm observing is somewhat flaky. I found out I could drag and drop a couple pages between two PDFs I downloaded from the internet. Worked once, then further attempts failed. It seems that some process to add a page to a PDF gets hung system-wide, if that makes any sense. I actually managed to trigger a couple crashes by copy/pasting/dragging PDF pages from thumbnail view and sent feedback to apple...

I just realized this was my problem, too. Everything worked fine until yesterday afternoon, while I was dragging & dropping. It suddenly refused to drop. Then nothing would drag either. I tried quitting preview. I tried rebooting my laptop. It will not work.

I don't want to have to purchase adobe.

I need this to work!

Thanks, finally found it by going to Utilities, Disk Utilities, the HD.

Repaired the Permissions & for the last 5 minutes it has been working.

I'll add more if it suddenly starts to act up again.

Thank you!

Old Toad .... Thanks again for your persistence and replies to this thread. I 'preciate it! Preview has been intermittent for me, sometimes working at random and most times not allowing drag and drop and page re-arrangement within a document. I don't know why I hadn't thought of repairing permissions but your suggestion lit the lightbulb for me and Preview now seems to be working normally ... for the moment at least. Thanks for your tip! 🙂

Same issue here. I found that sometimes drag’n’drop from one PDF to an other is working and sometimes it isn’t. I have no clue why. Ran disk utility several times already, to no avail.

I am getting the impression that Apple isn’t taking as much care about their products any more as we were used from them. Bugs all over the place (like Yosemite always forgetting settings of notification center, or iOS 8 forgetting widget order in action menus).

I'm having the same issue. For one of my PDF docs, Preview is refusing to let me drag in another PDF doc or individual pages of another PDF doc. It worked before for this document (I add pages to it every month) and it's currently working for other PDF docs. I did all the usual incantations, restart, repair permissions, removed all Preview related preference files (7 of them). I also did an Apple feedback. I also need this to work!

Repairing permissions worked ... and then it didn't. DANG!! I updated to Yosemite 10.10.1 hoping that would "fix" the problems with Preview, but alas, no. I've tried dragging and dropping with multiple files and it worked for about 5 times and then stopped. I'm also still seeing jumpy cursor movement and a disappearing scroll bar (which I discovered can be temporarily "fixed" by selecting a single page in the main display pane). Is anyone else not liking the rearrangement of the tool bar, moving the thumbnail pane from the right to the left side of the window from earlier versions, the change in the way annotation tools work, etc.?

There are so many nagging little bugs, problems, "features" that, as with IOS 8, Apple's quality control has failed. It feels like Apple has fiddled around with "design" at the expense of function and in the process broken what formerly "just worked."

Here's another "bug" I've found in Preview under Yosemite .... if I add annotations to a page in a .pdf file and then drag and drop that annotated page into a new .pdf file ... all the annotations are lost and do not appear on the page in the new .pdf file. I've tried this numerous times when drag and drop is working and every time I lose the annotations. Having to recreate annotations at every drag and drop is time consuming and annoying. Up until Yosemite Preview was a pretty stable app where all the features worked. The iteration of Preview in Yosemite doesn't "just work" anymore. I hope someone in the Apple support food chain is picking up on these problems so they can be fixed in a maintenance release.