10 Tips For Using the Preview App On Your iPhone

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Here are some tips for getting the most from the Preview App on your iPhone. 

The Preview App is a new app in iOS 26 that allows you to view and work with PDF's and Image Files. In this video let's look at some tips for using it with PDF files. So you can run the Preview App by itself and then open a file from inside it or you can go to the Files App and then when you find a PDF by default it will open it up in Preview. So I'm going to tap this PDF file here in the files app and it opens it up in Preview. Now that I'm in Preview there's a lot of different things I can do with it. You can see Tools here along the bottom. You can see a 3 dots button here with a menu of other things you can do. You can do even more by tapping on the name of the file here. Let's start by looking at how you can highlight text in a PDF.

So, if you have a regular PDF, it's not an image that's imbedded in a PDF, you can very easily select text just by tapping with your finger and then dragging along like that. Now I've got options in the Menu here like Copy, you can go over here to see more. One of those options on the first menu and here in the expanded menu is Highlight. If you tap Highlight it will ask you to choose a color here. You've got five different colors. Or you can Underline or Strike through the text. I'll choose this purple color here and now I've got this text highlighted in purple. You can then continue to select other text, highlight and it will use the last color that you selected. But you can easily change it like that. 

Now often we get PDF's that are actually forms we need to fill out. So I'm going to open up this PDF file here that's a form that I can fill out. When you are in a form like this as long as the creator of it built it as a form you can use the Form Filling Mode with this button here. Sometimes you run into PDF's that were just created as printed documents. They don't have the little fields in it that you can fill out. But this one does. You can see here in Blue the little areas I can fill-in. So I can tap on one, like here my last name, and you can see it even asks if I want to auto-fill that information here, like that. I'll tap on this one and I can auto-fill as well. But I can also just type here, like that, to fill in the form. You can Exit Form Filling Mode at any time with that same button here. You can go through all the different fields easily entering in the different information or using auto-fill in different situations.

Now if there is some part of the form you need to fill out and it doesn't have a Blue box that means the creator of the PDF didn't create that part of it properly. But you can add your own text overlay on top of that anytime you want. Just tap the little Plus button there and use Add Text Form Box. This will create your own box that you can position anywhere you want in the form and then fill-in your own text. 

In addition to that you can also Sign forms. So you can see here is a spot for a signature. When you're in Form Filling Mode tap the Plus button and you'll see Add Signature. If you haven't created a signature before it will ask you to do one now. So I'm just going to create a quick signature, like that, and then tap the checkmark there and it will place it here. I can drag it around, position it where I want, and resize it like that. I can tap the Pen button there and make it a different color if I like. I can even increase the thickness of the line, like that. Once you've added a signature you can tap the button here, choose Add Signature, and then you can choose that existing signature or add a new one. So, for instance, you may want to have your regular signature and then one that's just your initials for times where it just asks for initials. 

Now in addition for Form Filling Mode you can also use Markup Mode which is the button next to it. Now you have a variety of different pens you can draw with. So, for instance, you can tap any pen to select it. I'll tap this first one. Tap a second time and you've got options like Thickness, and how opaque the ink is. You also can tap this button here and then change the color, like that. So now you can just draw on the PDF form. Markup Mode also has a ton of other tools. You can tap the Plus button and you can add Stickers. You can add more text. You can add Shapes. All sorts of different things. Its primary purpose is when you get a PDF that somebody wants you to review. You can kind of mark it up with corrections and suggestions. 

Another tip here is if you use any pen to draw and you pause at the end of drawing a shape before releasing it will draw a perfect shape. For instance, if I want to draw a rectangle I can draw it but you can see how imperfect this is. But if I wait here at the end, pause, and then release it changes it to a perfect shape. Same thing with circles and ovals, like this, it will make them perfect. You can even do arrows like this, pause at the end, and now you get a perfect arrow. 

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At lot of times we get long PDF documents and we need to search for text in them. You can easily search with the little Search button there at the bottom. You can type the text you want to search for and it will find it, tell you how many there are, and then you've got these arrows where you can go back and forth in the document looking at each match. You can also tap to the left here and you can select to Search only for  whole words and whether or not you've matched case. 

You can also scan documents directly into Preview. To do that Launch Preview and then use the Scan Documents button. Then position your phone over the page and it should automatically capture things. Then tap the Checkmark button there and it will create a PDF with that scan in there. Once you've done that you've got all sorts of tools available including here, under the three dots button, the ability to rotate left or rotate right if you scanned it in the wrong orientation. 

You can also Crop, which is a great thing to do once you've scanned but also works in other PDF's as well. Use the Cropping Tool there. It will allow you to select a part of the document. So if you only needed, say, this part here you can select just that part. Then tap in the middle of it. You have the ability to Copy that section or Crop it. Now that you've cropped the PDF just to the portion you want. 

Let's say I've got a PDF document here and you want to Lock It so perhaps you can send it to somebody else and they can only open it with a password. The way to do that is tap on the name here. You've got lots of tools here like being able to move or rename the file. One of them here at the top is Lock. Now you can set it to require password and set and verify that password. That PDF will now be locked and if you send it to somebody over Messages or Mail they will need the password as well to open it. 

If you ever need to convert a PDF file to an Image you can do that by simply going here to the Name and there's an Export feature. So this works really well if you've scanned something in and now you want to make it a smaller file size. PDF may be pretty large. You can see here it's 1 meg. But if I say I just want this as a JPEG and I'm going to compress it a lot by moving the Slider over here to make it even smaller, then I can Export this as a JPEG image and now I can see here the PDF was 1 meg but this JPEG image was a fraction of that. If I tap to view it here you can see the quality is not too bad. So I was able to get a much smaller file size while still maintaining the quality of the scan. It's just a plain JPEG image now instead of a JPEG inside of a PDF. 

When viewing a multipage PDF you can swipe slightly from the left like that to reveal thumbnails and you can  jump easily through the document. You can also tap on the little button in the middle of a thumbnail and you can rotate each page, if it needs to be. You can also Insert more pages from another PDF file, a blank page, or scan more pages into a document. You can also rearrange the pages if you want by dragging and dropping to change the order. Another option in the Menu here is to Delete a page. Really useful when you get those PDF's that have tons of extra information at the end and you really only need the first few pages. You can delete those extra ones. 

Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.