Q: How do I save a pdf to iCloud drive on my iPad?

Just got off the phone with AppleCare and asked the associate the same question. Unfortunately this option is not available on current iOS.  The only way to do this is through the iCloud app on your PC and sync the PDF document to your iCloud Drive.  Disappointing that we have to go do a workaround for something that should be available on iOS.

Actually I just found a simpler workaround using your iPad or iPhone.  On Safari  tap the  document with arrow pointing up icon located on the upper right corner of safari:

Then select the option to email the PDF document to yourself  then when you receive the email tap and hold for document options and you will see the option to save Attachmen to iCloud Drive

From here you can choose where to save the attachment in your iCloud drive and the  tap move  to this location

And voilà you're done :-)  hope this helps

  Still Apple should make this easier for iOS users instead of this workaround but hopefully the engineers will add this in future iOS updates.

Thank you for the work around.  I have been driving myself mad this afternoon, thinking there must be away.  I often email myself as work arounds, but it never occurred to me the options available would be different.  Thank you again for sharing! I often tell my little man 'sharing is caring'

I just had the same issue. I had a series of PDFs on my Mac desktop and needed to get them into iOS so they'd be available for me to email them as attachments on my iPhone. Using iCloud I found this was impossible. I came up with two solutions that did work. I created an email on my desktop and mailed it to myself (not the ideal solution), then I also saved the PDFs to DropBox and found that I could enable the DropBox account to connect with Mail on iOS, so I could pick and choose which PDFs I wanted as attachments for emailing later. That worked best. Neither iCloud nor Google Drive worked for me.

Apple should really consider buying DropBox and make it an iOS / macOS exclusive.

Your method may work fine if the PDFs are already online. It doesn't work if you are trying to get PDFs from the desktop to iCloud or simply make them available on iOS.

Not sure why it was impossible. You just drag them from the Documents folder in the Finder to the iCloud Drive folder in Finder. I just tested it, and it was instantaneous.

Cheers,

GB

Because even though they may be "stored" in iCloud and accessible on the desktop, they are not visible, nor are they usable while using iOS.

Mine was. I'm not sure where you are looking? Also, are any of them larger than 15GB?

Cheers,

GB

G-Music wrote:

 

Because even though they may be "stored" in iCloud and accessible on the desktop, they are not visible, nor are they usable while using iOS.

Sure they are.  Once dragged into the iCloud Drive folder in Finder, they will upload to iCloud and can be accessed from the iCloud Drive App on iOS or any other App that supports iCloud Drive.

It may take a moment for the PDF to sync to the iPad's iCloud Drive App, but it will appear there eventually. 

Sorry, but that was not my experience and I'm running the latest versions of both OS X (it's not yet macOS) and iOS.

Try this support article:

Get help using iCloud Drive - Apple Support

Also, are you certain that you have iCloud Drive enabled on both your Mac and your device? Have you tried signing out of iCloud and then back in?

Cheers,

GB

I just tried copying a PDF to the iCloud Drive on my Mac. When it finished, I opened the iCloud Drive on my iPad and double tapped on that document, and it opened instantly, though it didn't say which app opened it.

BTW, PDFs are disk hogs. Avoid them when you can. They take up several times as much disk space as a comparable HMTL or RTF file, and you can't change the font to make them more readable. Serif fonts are better for body text but only if your screen has good image rendering, which all Apple products have. They also waste a lot of paper when you print, because they're usually made with HUGE margins.

G-Music wrote:

 

Sorry, but that was not my experience and I'm running the latest versions of both OS X (it's not yet macOS) and iOS.

Well then, you would need to tell us what you did exactly. Since it works for most of us, clearly something in your workflow is not correct or missing.

Where are you copying the file to in iCloud Drive? How are you placing it there?

Are you using the same Apple ID on the Mac as you are on the iPad for iCloud?

I made an alias to a folder residing on my iCloud drive and copied the alias into my documents folder.  Works well.