Merge PDFs into one file, in your browser
Choose the PDFs you want joined, put the list into the order you want them read in, and press Merge. Every page of every document is copied into one new file in exactly that order, and you save the result. The order is the whole job, so it is yours to set rather than alphabetical, and the copying is done by this tab on your own machine rather than by a server somewhere.
Put several PDFs into one
Choose the documents, put them in the order you want them, and press Merge. Your PDFs are not uploaded: they are read and rewritten by this tab, on your own machine, which is worth knowing when the things being merged are a contract, a payslip or a letter from a hospital.
What comes out is the pages. Interactive form fields, and links that point somewhere inside the document they came from, are copied as the marks they draw rather than as things you can still fill in or click, so keep the originals of anything that had a form in it. The merged file carries no title, author or dates from your documents either: it says it was made here and nothing else. A document with a password on it is refused rather than opened, and one at a time stops at 50 MB.
Merge PDFs, step by step
- Choose the documentsUse the button or drag them onto the box. Each one is checked as it arrives, so a file that is not really a PDF, or has a password on it, is turned away there and then rather than half way through the merge.
- Put them in the order you wantDrag a row up or down, or use the arrows beside it. Every row shows the first page, the number of pages and the size, which is usually enough to tell two scans from the same afternoon apart.
- Merge and saveOne press produces one file. It is written in this tab and handed straight to your downloads, and the page tells you how many pages went into it so you can check nothing was left behind.
The pages are copied across, not redrawn, so nothing is re-photographed
A merge here is not a picture of your pages. Each document is parsed, and its page objects are copied into a brand new one along with everything they point at: the fonts, the images, the colour spaces and the content streams that draw them. Nothing is rasterised, nothing is re-compressed, and a scan that arrived at 300 dpi leaves at 300 dpi with the same bytes inside it. The new file gets its own cross reference table written from the offsets the objects actually landed at, which is what makes it a valid document rather than three documents glued end to end. The library doing that is pdf-lib, and it is fetched only once you have chosen a file, so a visit that reads the page and leaves downloads none of it.
Every free PDF merger works the same way. You upload the documents, a server somewhere puts them together, and you download the result. It is a good deal on the face of it, and the part nobody mentions is that you have just posted the documents to a stranger.
Think about what people merge. Contracts with the signed page from the other side. Invoices for an accountant. Three letters from a hospital. A passport scan and a utility bill, for an agency that asked for proof of address. All of it goes up to somebody else’s machine, sits there for however long their retention policy says, and is protected by whatever their security happens to be that week. None of that is necessary, because joining two PDFs has never needed a server: it is reading a file format and writing it back out, and browsers have been able to do that for years.
So this one does it here. Your documents are read by the tab you are already looking at, the new file is assembled in the same place, and the only thing that leaves your machine is you, deciding to send the result somewhere.
The other half of the job is the order, which most of these sites treat as an afterthought. A merge
in the wrong order is not a small problem on a document somebody is going to sign, and sorting by
filename is not an answer when the files are called scan001 and scan002 and the signature page
is the one at the end. Drag the rows around until the list reads the way the document should.
Questions
Are my documents uploaded anywhere?
No. The pages are copied and the new file is written by code running in this tab, on your own machine, and the result goes straight to your downloads folder. That is why there is no queue, no size of file that costs money, and nothing to delete afterwards.
Can it merge a PDF that has a password on it?
No, and it will not pretend to. A protected document is turned away with a sentence saying so, because the alternative is a merged file with unreadable pages in the middle of it. Open it in Preview, type the password, then File and Export as PDF to save a copy without one and merge that.
What happens to forms, links and signatures?
Form fields and links that point inside their own document are copied as the marks they draw rather than as things you can still fill in or click, which is a property of copying pages between documents rather than a shortcut taken here. Keep the original of anything you still need to complete or that carries a digital signature.
Does the merged file carry the first document's details?
It does not. Title, author, subject and keywords are not copied across, so a file made from a payslip does not quietly go on calling itself by the payslip's name. The result says it was made by this tool and gives its own creation date, and that is the whole of what it says about itself.
How big a merge will it do?
Fifty megabytes for one document and a hundred and fifty for the whole batch, and it says so and stops rather than letting the tab run out of memory and die. Past that, merge in two goes and then merge the two results, which costs nothing but a second press.
Other things here
There is a full list on the free tools page. They all work the same way: in the browser, with nothing to install.
There is a free Mac app too.
Images by Edmund converts, resizes and compresses pictures a whole folder at a time, on your own machine, with nothing to upload and nothing to sign up for.
macOS 15 or later. Apple silicon Mac. Version 1.1.0, out 11 October 2026. What’s new.