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.

 

[invu]

It's been a while since the original question was posted, but I want to share the solution that I just found, for someone who might experience the same thing in the future.

I just had accidentally hit that [x] button while trying to sign a document (Why is it soooo easy to accidentally hit that button there? Why isn't there even a quick "confirmation" window that pops up before actually deleting it, Apple??).
While looking for a way to restore it, I came across this posting (I also saw one in Apple Discussion forum by the same author, but that discussion was closed already and I couldn't leave any reply there).

I know I can "recreate" a signature that would look very similar to the original by taking a screenshot of my signature from another document that I already signed and using my iPhone or even by printing a document and using the camera... but it won't "restore" the original.. It won't keep the integrity of my original signature itself that I have used for over 10 years..., so I know what the OP was looking for.

And I just found a solution!
Looks like the signature is stored as part of the "keychain" database.
I went into ~/Library/Keychains and restored whatever files that were modified just around the time I had accidentally deleted my signature (while having Preview closed), then reopened Preview, and Voila! The signature was back!!

The files I restored are
login.keychain-db
and
three most recently changed files under some folder that may look like "C0C2213293-ADFAS-ASDFAD-DFADF" (I just randomly typed this; it would look different on each computer and my Mac wouldn't even allow me to copy that folder name) which are
keychain-2.db
keychain-2.db-wal
com.apple.security.keychain-defaultContext.TrustedPeersHelper.db-wal

Hope this helps someone out there!