When you are reading a massive, 500-page PDF manual or a lengthy digital textbook, scrolling through hundreds of pages to find a specific chapter is incredibly tedious. You do not need to rely on external, third-party PDF managers to organize your reading material. The macOS Preview application includes a native, highly efficient bookmarking system that allows you to instantly save and recall specific pages within any PDF document.
How to Add a Bookmark to a Page
Adding a bookmark in Preview is just like dog-earing a physical page in a paperback book.
- Double-click your PDF file to open it in Preview.
- Scroll through the document until you find the exact page you want to save.
- Look at the menu bar at the very top of your screen (next to the Apple logo) and click Tools.
- From the drop-down menu, select Add Bookmark. (Alternatively, you can press the incredibly fast keyboard shortcut: Command + D).
A small, red ribbon icon will instantly appear in the top right corner of the page itself, indicating that the page has been successfully dog-eared and saved to your personal index.
How to View and Navigate Your Bookmarks
Once you have dropped several bookmarks throughout the massive document, you need a way to quickly jump between them without scrolling.
- Look at the top left corner of the Preview window and click the View Menu icon (it looks like a small square with a sidebar).
- From the drop-down menu, select Bookmarks.
The left sidebar will instantly change. Instead of showing tiny thumbnail previews of every single page, it will now display a clean, condensed list containing only the specific pages you have bookmarked. To jump to a saved page, simply click its entry in this sidebar list.
How to Rename or Delete Bookmarks
By default, Preview automatically names the bookmark based on the first few words of text it finds on that specific page. This AI-generated name is often confusing (e.g., it might name the bookmark “Figure 4.2” instead of “Chapter 3 Summary”).
To fix this, open the Bookmarks sidebar. Slowly double-click the AI-generated name of the bookmark. The text will become highlighted and editable, allowing you to manually type a human-readable title (like “Important Tax Form”).
If you no longer need the bookmark, simply right-click (or Control-click) the entry in the sidebar and select Delete, or click it once and press the Backspace key. The red ribbon will instantly vanish from the page.