Delete, move or resize an image in a PDF, and keep the page looking right

Open the file and click the picture

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Delete an image in 2 clicks

1. Open the PDF at /edit. The Select tool is already in hand (press V if you picked another).
2. Click the picture. A box with corner handles appears, and the panel on the right says “Selected · Picture”.
3. Press Delete or Backspace, or click Delete in that panel. On a phone, tap the bin on the bar that appears.
4. Save with the Save button or Ctrl+S.

To take out several pictures at once, Shift+click each one, or drag a box across empty space to catch everything it touches; the panel then offers Delete all with the count. Ctrl+A selects every object on the page in view, text included, so check the count before you press it.

Move or resize instead

The same selection moves and resizes:

• Move: drag the picture. Its edges and centre catch on the page’s edges and centre and on the other objects as they come close; hold Alt to drag freely.
• Nudge: the arrow keys move it 1 point per press, 10 with Shift.
• Resize: drag a corner. Pictures keep their proportions, so a photo never gets stretched; a drawing made of lines, by contrast, stretches freely.
• Duplicate: Ctrl+D, or the Duplicate button, places a copy just below and to the right.

The panel shows the picture’s position in points from the top left of the page, which helps when 2 pictures must line up exactly; with 2 or more selected, the Line up buttons align their edges or centres for you.

What fills the gap

Nothing. A PDF page is not a document in a word processor: every line of text and every picture sits at fixed coordinates, so taking a picture away leaves white space where it was, and nothing below moves up. You have 3 honest options:

1. Move the neighbours. Select the text or pictures below (drag a box across them) and drag them up as one block.
2. Fill it. Place a different picture with the Picture tool (Add an image or a logo to a PDF shows how), or add text.
3. Leave it. In a report, a clean gap often reads better than a squeezed layout.

Does deleting really remove the image from the file?

Yes, and the file size shows it. The editor writes the saved file anew, and a picture that no page draws any more is not written at all. Measured on our test files:

What we deleted	File before	File after
A 1200 by 900 photo added to the 1-page invoice	374 KB	2 KB
A photo stored on its own on page 2 of a 3-page photo file	6.0 MB	3.0 MB
A second appearance of a photo that page 1 also shows	3.0 MB	3.0 MB, unchanged

The last row is the one that surprises people. A PDF can store a picture once and draw it on many pages; a letterhead logo usually works like that.

So the file shrinks once the picture is gone from every page that shows it, or once you delete the pages themselves in the page rail.

When the image will not select on its own

Three cases look like a picture and behave differently:

• The page is a scan. A scanned page is one picture of the whole sheet. A click anywhere selects all of it, and Delete empties the page. To lose a stamp or a photo on a scan, crop the page with Crop PDF, or cover the area with a white rectangle from the Shape tool (that is white-out, and the white-out comparison says what it leaves behind). OCR adds searchable text to a scan but does not split the picture.
• It is a grouped graphic. Some files wrap a logo, a chart or a whole header in a group. A click selects the group, the panel calls it “Object”, and Delete removes everything in it. Undo, and keep it if the rest of the group matters.
• It is not a picture at all. A chart drawn from lines and shapes is many small objects. Drag a box across it to select them together, then delete or move them as one.

A stamp or a drawing someone added in Acrobat as a comment is an annotation, not page content, and the editor shows it but does not select it yet. Flatten PDF draws such comments into the page content, after which the editor can select them; all the flattened comments on a page come in as 1 grouped object, so they move and delete together.

Keep a copy before you delete

Extract images from PDF saves every picture in the file at the resolution it is stored in, without compressing it again. PDF to images covers the difference between pulling out the pictures and saving whole pages as pictures.

What this is for, and what it is not

Deleting pictures is for your own documents and those you have the right to change: an outdated logo on a template, a placeholder photo in a draft, a scan of a page that should not be in the report, a chart that will be replaced. It is not a way to strip someone else’s watermark or branding from their work, and it does not make a document say less than it did as a record: the person who sent it still has the original. The editor does not remove watermarks as a feature; a watermark built into the page content can be selected like any object, and whether you may remove it is a question about the file’s owner, not about the tool.

If the reason for deleting is privacy, delete is half the job. A picture taken off the page leaves the file, but a name or a number in the text beside it, in the document’s properties or in a bookmark stays. The privacy and protection guide covers redaction, which takes out everything under a box, pictures and text alike. Everything else the editor does is in Edit a PDF.