How to Add Images and Hyperlinks in PDF Files (2026 Guide)

These two tasks look similar and are not. Placing an image on a PDF page is drawing: any tool that can draw can do it. A hyperlink is a separate annotation object with its own rectangle and its own action, and a tool either implements that object or it cannot make a link at all, no matter how much blue underlined text it can put on the page. Our own tool can do the first and not the second, and the rest of this page explains both mechanisms so you can predict what any tool will do.

Adding an image, and the size mistake everyone makes

When you place an image on a PDF page, the image is embedded at its own pixel dimensions and then drawn scaled into the box you positioned. The scaling is display geometry; it does not change what is stored. Drop a 4000 pixel wide photograph into a box two inches across and all four thousand pixels go into the file. The page shows a small picture and the document carries a large one.

So resize the image before you place it. The arithmetic is simple: multiply the printed width in inches by the resolution you need. A two inch wide logo at 300 dpi needs 600 pixels. At 150 dpi, which is fine for anything that will only be read on a screen, it needs 300. Anything beyond that is file size you are carrying for no visible benefit, and it is the single commonest reason a PDF with three small images ends up at 20 MB.

In RaptorPDF

The image placement lives in the sign tool rather than in the annotator, which is not obvious from the name. Open the tool, use "Upload signature image", and the picture appears on the page: drag to move it, drag the corner dot to resize, press Delete to remove it. It is not limited to signatures. A logo, a stamp, a scanned initial or a photograph all work the same way.

Three specifics worth knowing:

• Use PNG or JPEG. The picker also offers WebP, but WebP does not currently embed correctly and the image can disappear from the downloaded file. Convert to PNG first.
• PNG transparency is preserved, so a logo with a transparent background sits on the page properly rather than in a white box. This is the reason to use PNG for logos and JPEG for photographs.
• Uploaded images are remembered in your browser, up to six of them, stored locally on that one device. They are not synced anywhere and they disappear if you clear site data.

The placement is flattened into the page at download, which means it becomes part of the page graphics and cannot be moved or removed by whoever opens the file afterwards.

One warning about Image to PDF

Turning a set of photographs into a PDF is a different tool and it has a real weakness you should know about: it re-encodes every image as PNG on the way in. PNG is lossless, so nothing gets blurry, but a lossless encoding of a photograph is several times larger than the JPEG it came from. Converting a dozen phone photos to a single PDF therefore produces a much bigger file than the sum of the originals. If size matters, resize the photographs down first, or assemble the PDF in a tool that passes JPEG data through unchanged.

On other tools

Apple Preview can place an image on a page through the markup toolbar, entirely locally. LibreOffice Draw inserts images through Insert, Image and then exports the whole document to PDF, which means the rest of the page is re-rendered too, so check the result against the original. Acrobat's Edit PDF has a proper Add Image function and lets you replace an existing image in place, which nothing free does.

How PDF links actually work

Understanding this explains almost every strange link behaviour you have run into.

A hyperlink in a PDF is a /Link annotation. It consists of a rectangle on the page and an action, usually a /URI action containing the address. Crucially, the rectangle is not attached to the text. The blue underlined words you see are ordinary drawn text; the clickable region is an invisible box that happens to sit over them. They are two separate things that were placed to line up.

Three consequences follow, and all three are things people report as bugs:

• The clickable area can be slightly wrong, extending past the end of the word or stopping short of it, because it was drawn as a rectangle rather than derived from the text.
• A link across a line break needs two rectangles. One annotation cannot be L-shaped, so a link on text that wraps has to be split, and a tool that does not do that leaves half the phrase unclickable.
• Blue underlined text is not evidence of a link. If a tool can only draw, it can produce text that looks exactly like a hyperlink and does nothing when clicked. Always test by clicking.

There is a useful consolation if your tool cannot create link annotations. Many readers, Acrobat included, will detect a plain text URL on the page and make it clickable themselves; Acrobat has a preference for exactly this. It is not reliable across every reader, but writing out the full address as visible text means the reader can at minimum select and copy it, which a broken link annotation does not offer. So https://www.raptorpdf.com written out in full is a reasonable fallback, and a bare "click here" is not.

The reliable route: links in the source document

Add the link in Word, Google Docs, LibreOffice or InDesign, then export. Those applications emit proper /Link annotations, handle line-wrapped links correctly, and get the rectangles right because they know where the text is.

One trap catches people constantly, and it is worth stating precisely: Save as PDF and Print to PDF are not the same thing. Word's own Save As or Export to PDF preserves hyperlinks. Sending the same document to "Microsoft Print to PDF" on Windows, or through the macOS print dialog's Save as PDF, goes through a print pipeline that has no concept of link annotations, so every link is silently lost. The resulting file looks identical and nothing is clickable. If your exported PDF lost its links, this is almost certainly why.

The same logic applies to anything that re-renders a page. Compressing a PDF by rasterising its pages, which is how our compressor and many others work, destroys link annotations along with the text layer. Add links last, or accept that they will not survive.

What each tool can and cannot do

Tool	Place an image	Create a clickable link	Local processing
RaptorPDF	Yes, via the sign tool; PNG or JPEG	No. Visible URL text only	Yes, nothing uploaded
Apple Preview	Yes, markup toolbar	No	Yes
Word, Docs, LibreOffice Writer	Yes, in the source document	Yes, on export; not via Print to PDF	Word and LibreOffice yes, Docs no
LibreOffice Draw	Yes	Yes	Yes
Adobe Acrobat Pro	Yes, including replacing an existing image	Yes, with link types for URL, page and email	Desktop version yes

Pricing for the commercial options changes, so check the vendor's page rather than a figure in an article. For our part: free covers three operations a day with files up to 50 MB, no watermark and no account, and operations are counted at download, so placing an image and stamping page numbers in one session before downloading counts once. Pro is $4.99 a month or $39.99 a year with a 300 MB ceiling.

Getting a professional result

• Size the image before you place it, not after. Printed width in inches times the target resolution gives the pixel width you need. Everything above that is waste.
• PNG for logos and anything with flat colour or transparency, JPEG for photographs. A JPEG logo picks up visible artefacts around sharp edges and text; a PNG photograph is several times larger than it needs to be.
• Click every link in at least two readers before distributing. Link annotations are exactly the kind of thing that works in the application that made the file and nowhere else.
• Write URLs out in full where the audience might print the document, since a printed "click here" is useless.
• Do the linking last. Compression, page normalisation and anything that re-renders the page will remove link annotations.
• Check the file size afterwards. If it jumped by megabytes after adding one small picture, the picture was too big in pixel terms. Replace it with a resized copy rather than reaching for a compressor, which on a text document will rasterise the whole thing and cost you the text layer.

Frequently Asked Questions

Related Resources

• PDF Annotator — Add text and stamps to PDFs
• Compress PDF — Reduce size after adding images
• PDF Annotation Tools Comparison
• Convert PDF to Word — Then add images in Word