Introduction

So much criticism has been heaped on the likes of News and Photos that it can be easy to forget the software that Apple gets right—apps that are both simple and powerful. There may be no better example of this than Preview, which has been built into macOS from the beginning.

To call attention to all the things Preview can do, we published the “Power of Preview” series of articles in TidBITS in early 2016. The articles proved wildly popular, and we received numerous requests for a book about Preview. “That’ll be easy,” we thought. Little did we know.

On the surface, Preview is a simple image and PDF viewer that launches automatically when you open a photo or a PDF document. Open, read, close—that’s the Preview experience most people have most of the time. But Preview offers so much more. Use Preview to do all this—no additional apps required:

• Take screenshots and import photos directly from a camera

• Quickly cull unwanted images from a large collection

• Play slideshows of party photos

• Crop, resize, and edit images for use on your website

• Convert images to many different formats

• Scan paper documents with a scanner

• Annotate PDFs with highlights, notes, and shapes

• Fill out and sign PDF-based forms digitally, rather than going to the trouble of printing and signing manually

• Rearrange and delete PDF pages, and merge PDFs

We were under the impression that we had covered all of Preview’s features in our articles, and that we would merely have to polish the prose a bit and tweak some screenshots to turn the articles into a book. For each chapter, though, as we started testing and retesting what we’d written, we discovered that Preview was even deeper and more capable than we’d previously realized. Couple that with a lot more screenshots, step-by-step instructions, and real-world usage suggestions, and our few articles turned into a full-fledged book.

Our goal here is to show you everything that Preview can do and give you ideas for using it to work with images and PDFs. Follow along, and we’ll help you become far more capable with Preview and with your Mac in general.

The first version of this book focused on Preview in macOS 10.11 El Capitan, and we’ve now examined everything up to macOS 10.15 Catalina. If you have an older version of macOS, much of this book will work just fine for you, though the older your operating system, the more differences you may see.