Is there a way to recover lost signatures in Preview?

[ScottR]

Due to some bad advice in the Apple discussion forums I deleted a signature in Preview (the question, from someone else, had been how to delete a signature from a document; the response from a "Level 9" was to hit the little X in the Markup bar... which left the darned signature on the document but deleted it from Preview itself).

How can I recover the deleted signature? Looks like Time Machine won't let me select an older version of Preview to go back to.

Asking this in the Apple Discussions just resulted in a "Community Specialist" posting a link to a page on how to create signatures--which I obviously already knew how to do. But I really dislike the choices offered: using a finger on the trackpad or an iPhone screen results in a horrible-looking signature, and holding a sheet of paper with a signature up to the built-in camera (which I keep taped over) takes multiple tries to get a barely-acceptable result.

... if there's a hack to instead get Preview to import a scanned jpg or pdf of my signature, that would be great, too.

 

[Bigwaff]

Possibly in the ~/Library/Containers/com. apple.Preview/Data/Library/Preferences folder. Might be in one of your backups.

 

[ScottR]

Thanks. I tried restoring the folder from a backup, and the signature did not come back.

 

[jadesimian]

Hi there. I know I'm over a year late with this, but I also accidentally deleted a signature from Preview. I didn't mean to click the little x! Anyway, I searched for some advice and found this thread.

And then I had a little epiphany—my workaround to get the signature back was to find a PDF which already had the signature I'd deleted. I opened the PDF on my phone, zoomed into the signature, and took a screenshot of it (so I could clean up any surrounding intruding bits by drawing over them in white). I then selected the option in Preview to add a signature by camera, and held up my screenshot. Voila! The signature was back!

Hope this helps anyone who needs a quick fix.

 

[ScottR]

Hi there. I know I'm over a year late with this, but I also accidentally deleted a signature from Preview. I didn't mean to click the little x! Anyway, I searched for some advice and found this thread.

And then I had a little epiphany—my workaround to get the signature back was to find a PDF which already had the signature I'd deleted. I opened the PDF on my phone, zoomed into the signature, and took a screenshot of it (so I could clean up any surrounding intruding bits by drawing over them in white). I then selected the option in Preview to add a signature by camera, and held up my screenshot. Voila! The signature was back!

Hope this helps anyone who needs a quick fix.

I addressed this in my original post.

 

[jadesimian]

I addressed this in my original post.

Yes, I saw. I just thought I would offer my experience with recovering the exact signature I'd deleted. And it worked quite well for me. YMMV I guess.