10 Tips For Working With Images In the Preview App On Your iPhone

Hi, this is Gary at MacMost.com. Here are some tips for using the Preview App on your iPhone with images. 

So the Preview App on the iPhone is new in iOS 26 and it is similar to the Preview app that has been on the Mac for years. It allows you to view PDF files and Image files and also mark them up. Draw on them, add text, add arrows and make some changes. Like, for instance, I'll show you how you can Crop and Export images in a different format. Now I'm only going to deal with images here. I did a video previously that dealt with PDF files. 

You have many ways to get an image into the Preview App to work with it. For instance you can go to Preview itself and then you have a little file browser down here. You can even expand it to fill the entire screen there. You could browse through your files, just like in the Files App, looking through everything you've got on your iPhone and in iCloud Drive and in other file systems that you have connected to your iPhone. You also can go into the Files App and with an image, by default, if you tap it, it will open up in Preview. But if you tap and hold you actually get all the options including to Open With and you can see here that Preview sets the default. But you can also set Preview with Quick Look as the default. It just puts a checkmark there and then you're back to just previewing like that without ever leaving the Files App. 

If you did that then now you would have to tap and hold and Open With and then select Preview in order to open it in Preview. 

Also in the Photos App you can tap and hold an image and then select Share. With Share you can look for Preview here as one of the icons. By default you won't see it there but you can go to More and this is where you can customize by tapping Edit which items are here at the top under Favorites. Once you have Preview there then it will always appear here and you can tap Preview to Export an image from your Photos Library and open it as a file in Preview. It will save a copy to the Preview Folder in iCloud Drive to do that. Anyway you do it you will end up being able to view the image in Preview. Once you're viewing it you can now work with it to mark it up and do some other things. 

My first tip is this button down here, the i button, the Information Button. Tap that and you are going to get a huge list of all of the metadata for this image. It reveals everything. Even the GPS location coordinates and everything that are saved as metadata for this image. What's here depends on how you created this image. If you simply created this image on your phone, in an Image Editor or Graphics App, or something like that then you may ended up with very little metadata here. 

Now one of the main things you may want to do with an image is to add text to it. So to do that and a lot of these other things you need to enter Markup Mode. Tap the little Markup Button here at the bottom left. Now you're in Markup Mode. Then you'll see the Markup Mode indicated here at the top and you can tap there to exit Markup Mode. Now you have a variety of different pens and highlighters and all sorts of things here at the bottom that you can choose from. We'll look at those in a minute. But the Plus Button reveals a lot of extra functionality like the ability to add text. You can tap Add Text there and then you can change its color with this dot here. You can tap here and change the Font. You can make it larger, for instance, by tapping right there. Let's make it Bold. You can change the Font there to a new one, like this. Then you can tap and drag the text around and place it where you want on the image. Then just continue to work on it. So I can, for instance, change its color. Let's make it white there. Then you may also want to add an arrow to point to something. So you can use the same Plus Button there and you can use Add Shape. One of the shapes here is an arrow. Then you've got an arrow. You can use the two blue dots there to drag around the end. Tap on the line here to change the color and then also the thickness for the line, like that. You can also tap here and decide where the arrowheads go. 

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But you may want to add other kinds of shapes. Like, for instance, if you look at the circle shape there you may think, why would I want a big circle like this. But you can change the color to No Fill and then change the border with this second button here to a color, let's make it a little thicker, like that. Now you've got a shape here that you can reposition, resize, as you like to circle an area. It is a little tricky to work with shapes like this. Sometimes it really helps to zoom in with two fingers so it is easier to grab what's there. But I find using the Selection Tool here you can easily circle something and then it will select it. In this case it got the arrow and circle so let's just get the circle like this. Then once it is selected it is fairly easy to move it around like that, if you like. 

Now you can also add more things here. One thing you can add is a sticker. Stickers are things you may have previously created using emoji characters or grabbing things from images that you made. You also can just do plain emoji characters and other stickers you may get from third party apps. So you can add a simple emoji character like that. Resize it and move it around to where you want. But if you just want to draw you've got all these drawing tools. So many things down here are just different things to draw. A second tap on each one will give you a thickness and also an opacity. You can also tap here and change the color that you're drawing with. Then you can just draw something here, whatever you like. If you're a better artist than me you might be able to draw something interesting over your image. 

Now when learning all this you're going to make lots of mistakes. So it is useful to know how to Undo. You do have a quick Undo here with the three dots or More button at the top right and you can Undo anything like that drawing there. You can also Redo it. You can also tap once with three fingers on the image you get the little Undo/Redo Toolbar that you can use. 

One last thing that's really cool to be able to add to this is the Loop. The Loop is a circle, like this, but you can change the size of the circle and the magnification. It's like a little magnifying glass. You can drag it around to magnify a part of an image. You can even add more than one loop to the image if you want. 

Now let's Exit the Markup Tools and let's look at how you can Crop an image. Cropping an image means first selecting it. Use the Selection Tool here and then you can drag the corners or sides to crop the image as much or as little as you want. Like that. Then you can Copy the selection or crop it. Another thing you may want to do is Export the image. You won't find that here in More. You will find it here in the Title Menu which allows you to Rename the file in place, move it, duplicate it and so on. There's an Export function. The Export function will let you pick the format so you can export say as a JPEG and then pick the quality, which will reduce the size here. You can see the estimated size of the export. This will save it out as a new image to a location that you want. 

By the way if you want to do this with the photos in your Photos Library there's no need, usually, to go to Preview because the Markup Tools that are in Preview are also in Photos. So select your photo here and then tap the Adjustment Tools down here. You'll see all your regular Adjustment Tools, like Cropping and Filters and stuff at the bottom. But at the top you'll see a Markup Button. Tap that and you'll see all of the same tools available right here in Photos. So, for instance, you can add, say, the Loop. The great thing about Photos, of course, is that even after you save it, like this, you'll see the photo has that change. But you can always go back into it and when you edit it again it's got the Revert Button because Photos always remembers the original copy. 

Here  are a few other tips. You've got the ability to Copy a subject out of a photo in a variety of places including here in the Photos App. So, for instance, if I wanted to just have the zebra here I can tap and hold the zebra and then select Copy and then I can use it somewhere else. Right here in Messages I can just Paste that in and I just paste the zebra, not the background. 

But you have the ability to kind of do the opposite with the image right here in Preview. You can tap the More button and then there's Remove Background. So it will leave the subject there and get rid of the background. 

So the one thing you can do with images with Preview that you can't even do with the Preview App on the Mac, is you can start with a blank image. Here's how you do it. In Preview, when you start it up you just choose New Document and you choose Empty Image or New From Clipboard. If you choose Empty Image you can always Paste something into it or start drawing. 

So while Preview is a pretty basic graphics app for your iPhone at least it is graphics app. You can do some things with it that you couldn't do before on your iPhone unless you went and got third party graphics app. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.