How to Delete, Rotate and Reorder PDF Pages on iPhone and Mac

Every scanned document arrives with something wrong. A blank back for every single-sided sheet. One page that went through the feeder sideways. The cover somewhere in the middle because the stack was upside down.

None of it is hard. What makes it tedious is doing it one page at a time.

Fix the whole document on one screen

Edit Pages in PDF Combiner puts every page in a list you can tick, drag and act on in bulk.

1. 1

   Open Edit Pages and add the document

   Every page appears as a numbered row with a thumbnail, so you can see what you’re about to do before you do it.

2. 2

   Tick everything that's wrong

   Each row has a checkbox; the one in the header selects the lot. This is the part that saves the time — the blank backs of a duplex scan are every second page, and they go together in one pass.

3. 3

   Rotate or delete the selection

   The two buttons at the top of the list act on everything ticked. Each tap of rotate turns the selected pages 90° clockwise, and the thumbnails turn with them, so you can see you got it right. Deleting asks for confirmation first. Individual rows have their own rotate and delete buttons for one-off fixes.

4. 4

   Hold and drag to reorder

   Hold a row and move it up or down the list. The numbers follow, so the order you see is the order you’ll get.

5. 5

   Generate

   The result is saved as a new document — the original is untouched, which matters when the source is a signed contract or a bank statement. Rename it on the way out, or hand it straight to the next tool.

All of it runs on the device, and that’s not a small detail here: the documents that need this treatment are almost always scans of things you’d rather not upload anywhere.

What the built-in tools do

On iPhone and iPad, Preview has handled pages since iOS 26. Open the PDF and tap the page count to bring up the thumbnails — pinch two fingers on the page if the count isn’t showing. Touch and hold a thumbnail for the menu: Delete, Rotate Left, Rotate Right, plus the insert options. With the menu up, drag the thumbnail above or below another page to reorder. The ••• menu at the top rotates the page you’re looking at without going into the thumbnails at all.

On Mac, choose View → Thumbnails, click a page and press Delete, or drag thumbnails to reorder. Command-click picks up several pages that aren’t next to each other — the one thing the Mac has always done better than the phone.

Both are fine for one document. What wears thin is repetition: fifteen scans that each need their blank backs removed, or a merged file where four sources came in at four different rotations. Preview works a page at a time by design; there’s no ticking six pages and rotating them together.

Deleting isn’t always the answer

If you’re removing most of a document, keeping what you want is fewer moves than deleting what you don’t. Extract Pages takes the pages you name and makes a new document out of them, leaving the original alone — covered in the guide to splitting a PDF into separate files.

Two things worth doing after a reorder, both easy to forget:

• The printed numbers now lie. Page 7 of the file says “5” at the bottom because that number was printed into the page. Add Page Numbers puts a correct set on the finished document.
• Uneven page widths. A document assembled from several sources jumps between Letter, A4 and photo-shaped pages. Align Page Width evens them out in one pass — worth doing last, before it goes to a printer or an archive.

Clean up before you merge, not after

If several documents are heading into one file, fix the pages first. Rotating one scan while it’s still a four-page file is quick. Finding those same four pages inside an eighty-page merged document is not.

The order that saves the most time: clean up each source, then merge, then renumber. Going the other way means exporting, spotting the problem and starting again.

What page editing is not

Everything here works on whole pages. Reorder them, rotate them, delete them, add them — but not change what’s printed on them. Fixing a typo inside a paragraph, adjusting a number in a table or rewriting a heading is a different class of tool, and PDF Combiner doesn’t do it.

Worth knowing for scans in particular: a scanned page contains no text at all, just a picture of text. Text Recognition (OCR) can make it searchable, which is genuinely useful when you’re hunting through forty pages of contract. It still doesn’t make the words editable.

More walkthroughs like this one are in the PDF Combiner guides.

Frequently asked questions