An Introduction To the iPhone Preview App In iOS 26

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at the new Preview App on your iPhone. 

Among all the new features in iOS 26 one that really stands out is the addition of the Preview App. The Preview App has been available on the Mac for decades. Mac users know how valuable this utility is. Now that it is on the iPhone it literally adds hundreds of new features to your iPhone. Apple could have just listed all the new features in Preview as What's New in iOS 26. That alone would be pretty impressive.

The first thing you need to realize with Preview is the name is a little misleading. It suggests that all you can do is really view some things using the app. You can do so much more. The Preview App works primarily with two different file types. PDF Files and Image Files. It can do a lot with both. So, here's the new Preview App here that you get with iOS 26. You can launch it by itself. But you can also launch it by trying to Open a PDF or Image in the Files App. So if I were to just launch Preview you could see here it gives me a little greeting there at the top. There's a few buttons, which I'll get to later. Then also a file dialogue here where I can browse throughout all of my files. But you can also get to Preview by just going into your Files App and then browsing in there. If you select a PDF or an Image File and just basically tap it to open it, like this Invoice.pdf file here, you may not even notice it at first because previously it opened it up in a kind of special mode in the Files app that mimicked some of the basic features of Preview on the Mac. But now it is a separate app so it actually switched you to the Preview App. You could see here in the App Switcher that I've got Files and I've moved to Preview here. 

But whether you open up the file from Preview or you just tap on a PDF or Image in the Files App you have the same basic functionality in Preview. For instance, you can simply just view the PDF. So in this case I see the PDF here but I can easily use two fingers and then I can drag and navigate around pretty easily to view different areas of the document. But if we go back here and open up a bigger PDF, like this book right here which has many pages, we can tap on that and then tap here and actually view thumbnails of all the pages. So we can easily scroll through and get to where we want. We could also just go to any page here and then scroll through the whole document. You see it continues to scroll. 

Also advanced functionality in the PDF's works like links here. So this table of contents in this PDF was designed to link to each chapter. So I can just tap on one there and it will take me right to that page. You can also select text very easily in PDF's. So you can see I can select text like that and then copy that text just like you would on a Mac. Of course some PDF's may be specifically published by the creator to not allow selection. So that's all the stuff you can do to basically read the PDF. 

But you can actually manipulate PDF's as well. So let's look at this PDF right here which has just four pages in it. I can easily jump around to any page I want. But there are more options. I can tap here in the middle of a page and notice that I can rotate individual pages. I can crop them. I can insert a blank page anywhere I want in the document. I can insert from a file. So let's go and insert from file and then select that invoice and open it. You can see it's actually going to add that PDF into the middle of this PDF. You can also start dragging a single page, like this, and add more pages to it and then with multiple pages selected you can go to another document, like this invoice PDF here and then drop that into this document. So there's a lot you can do but it is a little tricky to manage all of the touch gestures. 

If you find these videos valuable consider joining the more than 2000 others that support MacMost at Patreon. You get exclusive content, course discounts, and more. You can check it out at macmost.com/patreon. 

Another big part of Preview is being able to fill in PDF forms. So, here's a form and it has several fields here that I can fill-in. What you want to do is want to tap this tool here at the bottom which helps you fill out forms. You can see it highlights in blue all the places that the creator of this document indicated that there is a field to be filled in. You can tap on anyone of these fields here and then type something, like that, into the field. You can, of course, zoom in to make it a little bit easier to deal with those. You can use Autofill for a lot of these things. Like here for the address, for instance. Note if you don't see these blue fields appear it means that the person that created the PDF didn't add these fields to it. But you can still add your own text overlays to this using this Plus Button here. Just select outside of any available field and then you should see a Plus Button and then you can add a textbox, like this, and in this textbox you can add whatever you want, like that, and then you can tap it and drag it around and place it somewhere you want. So you do have options even if the PDF isn't well made. 

Another thing you can do is Sign documents. So if you find a Signature Field, like this, tap in it so you don't have a field selected and then use that Plus Button there and then Add Signature. Here there's a button for adding and removing a signature which you'll need to do the first time. You can see here how you can add a new one and you can just use your finger on the screen to create one. I already had a couple created there so I'll just select one of these, like that, and I can size it properly and even tap here and I can change the color of it, say if I wanted it to be blue instead of black. Then have that signature placed in the right spot. 

Now the other thing that Preview does and this is what a lot of people use it for, is to Markup or Annotate a PDF. So the idea here is perhaps somebody has provided you with a PDF and they want your feedback on it. So you can use the Markup Tool here, that I've just clicked on. Then you have a variety of different tools here. You can draw using most of these pen tools, like this. You've got a Highlighter Tool. You can scroll over and there's even more here that you can use. You've got this Color Option here so you can change the color of whatever tool it is that you're using. Most of these tools have options. So once you've selected it, tap it again and it brings up Options for thickness and transparency. There's even a Ruler tool here that you can position and rotate and then use to draw straight lines, like that. In addition to that there is the Plus Button here which allows you to use Stickers and textboxes similar to the ones we looked at for filling out forms. You can add Signatures if you want. You can add Shapes  and there's a bunch of different shapes that you can add here, like rounded rectangles and circles. You can add Arrows and then with the arrows selected there you can select the ends of the arrow. You can tap here to select the color and the thickness of it. You can do the same thing with Lines as well. So there is a lot here. There's even this little loop shape that you can add that's a circle that you can drag around and then use the blue dot there to make it larger and the green dot to increase the magnification. 

Now the other type of File that you can work with in Preview are Image Formats. So formats like jpegs and pngs and so on. So I've got a few here. For instance, if I tap on this image inside of the Files App it goes to Preview and shows me the image. I could also have opened it up from inside of Preview. Then you can view the image. So you could zoom in on the image and scan around in the image. You've got some other tools. Like, for instance, iOS has identified animal here and it indicates that with this little button there. So it gives me visual lookup for that animal. You'll find that for other things in Images as well. 

You also have a Selection Tool here. So you can use the Selection Tool and then define the area you want by dragging the dot. So you can select an area like this. Once you do that you can tap on the Selection and you have two options. One is Copy. So you can Copy this. You can Paste it anywhere. In an email, in another graphics app, right into a Note, that kind of thing. You can also Crop to change the image. So now it is cropped to that. But there is also a lot of other things you do with the image. So you've got it open here. You can tap the three dots button and you can see here that you've got the ability to rotate the image. You can rotate right. You can Flip horizontally or vertically if it is a mirrored image. You can adjust the size. So I can adjust here by changing the size and I can have it scaled proportionally or not, change the resolution, resample the image. All the standard stuff you would get in an Image Editing App. 

Another option that you would have seen there is to remove the Background. It works better in an Image like this where there is an obvious subject. I can remove the background like that. Now you also have the option to just tap and hold a subject. Now you can drag the subject around, perhaps go to another app, and just drop it in there. Just like you could in the Photos App.

Now you also have the ability to Markup an image just like you could with the PDF. You've got the Markup Tool right here and you have all the same tools here. So, for instance, you can draw on an image if you like using any of these. You can add something like text or sticker or a shape, like let's say an arrow like this. Let's make the arrow a little bit thicker and make it so we can see it, like that. Then we could take that arrow and move it anywhere we want. Once we save this image out it will imprint those pixels onto this image here. It is easy to add text. So if you're looking for a way to add text to an image, like a description or whatever, imprinted on the image this is how you can do it. You can even combine tools in weird ways. So, for instance, I can tap here to select the subject like that and then I can go out of this image and into this one and drop me into this image like that. 

Finally, you can export an image. So, basically you can convert it to another format. You can do that a couple of ways. One is to use the Share button down here and then before you Share it, go to Options here, and you can choose something other than Current. Like JPEG here and then set the size for the JPEG. But you can also tap up here and then use Export. Then you have the same controls here. So I can select JPEG. Change the size. Or PNG. 

So those are the basics. But you can combine those and use different features of those, to do lots of different things. The Markup Tools alone have a ton of different features in them. Here are two special features that the iPhone version of Preview has and you really don't have on the Mac version. So, if I go into Preview, like this, you can see there are two buttons up here. The first one is something that people have been wishing they would add to the Mac version of Preview but haven't yet. But it is right here in the very first version of Preview for iOS. You can create a New Document. It will create a new empty image or if you have copied something to the Clipboard it will allow you to create a new document that just has that item in it. I'll just create a new empty image here and it is just this big empty image and now I can draw in it with the Markup Tools or I can Paste something else into it. I can tap here and I can immediately just resize it so if I don't want it to be this width and this height I can set it to whatever I want. So you can basically use Preview to start from a blank slate and draw something. The first native pixel editing app we have on the iPhone. 

The other options here is to scan documents. Now technically you can do that in Preview on the Mac as long as you have a scanner. You don't need a scanner with the iPhone because you've got the camera. You use that to scan. So I can tap Scan Document and it will use the camera to scan the page it sees. It will even do it automatically and then it will capture the next page like that. You can use the controls. This isn't new. This is something that has been in iOS for a while. You just did it through the Files App. But now you can do it in Preview here. So you've got this Scan Document. Now I can rename it or put it where I want. 

So, once you've update to iOS 26 check out the Preview App. I know Mac users are going to be all over it. But if you've never used it before on a Mac get to know it now on the iPhone because it is an extremely useful tool. Thanks for watching.