Everything You Can Do With Images Without Launching an App

If you need to rotate, trim, convert or just view some images on a Mac, you don't need to use any app at all. You can do these and more using just the tools in the Finder and macOS.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. There's everything you can do with an image file on your Mac without even needing to launch an app.
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So you may think that in order to do anything with an image file on your Mac, including even just to view it, you need to open up the file in an app. But actually you can do a lot of things with just the Finder and macOS without needing any app at all. 
For instance, let's say I've got an image like this one. If I open it up here in Preview you can see it's on its side. It needs to be rotated. You can do this here in Preview of course. You've got a button right there. But actually you don't need to use any app at all to do that. You can select the image here and then if you Control Click on it, right click, two-finger click on a trackpad to bring up the Context Menu. You go to Quick Actions. One of the Quick Actions you can use is to rotate it left. You can see the little icon change there. Now if I open this up you can see it's rotated the right way. 
You can actually access these Quick Actions on the right side of a Finder window if you turn on the Preview. So in the View Menu use Show Preview and you can see some of these items here including under More there's that Rotate Left. You can customize this and then decide you want to drag Rotate Left to the top so it is the first one and now you can see that it appears right here. Easy access. Now just click it here and you can see it rotates the image very easily 90 degrees so you can get it right. 
Now another thing you do with Quick Actions is Convert. So it's available here or again you can bring up the Context Menu and go to Quick Actions. Then use Convert Image. Then you've got a variety of different options here. You can convert to jpeg, png, or high efficiency format.  You can preserve the metadata, like for instance if it is a photo the time the photo was taken, the lens that was used, all that kind of thing. Then you can click Convert and it actually will create a new copy of the same image there with the new format. 
Another thing you can do as a Quick Action is Remove Background. So for an image like this where there is a subject in it, if I choose that, it will create a new version of it with the words Background Removed right there. You can see if I open this one up then this is all transparent and just the subject is there. It only works if it can recognize a subject in the foreground so the background can be removed. Note this is the same thing that you get if you were to open up, say in Preview here, and then go to Tools and Remove Background.
Now another thing you can do with the Quick Actions is go directly to Markup. So the Markup Tool is built into macOS and you'll find it in apps, like for instance in Preview. But you don't need to launch Preview to Markup an image. You can just go right to Markup and you can see I'm still here in the Finder. It's just another window on top. But I have all these Markup Tools. I can Draw. I can Add Shapes. I can Add Text. I can even sign it if this is a scan of something. I can write text on it. I can even do other things like you can rotate in here. 
Now in addition to all the Markup tools there is one tool that is kind of separate from all those. That's this one right here. It's the Crop Tool. So without opening up an app you can use Markup and then Crop. With Crop turned on you can grab the corners and recenter the image and work the cropping tool similar to what you'll find in Preview and Photos. Then click Crop and you'll still see the rest of the image is there so you can go back into the Crop Tool. Or you can click Done and now you can see the image here has been changed. 
Another thing you can do without opening an app is view the image. I've got this preview here on the right and I've showed you how to get that. But you can get a full size preview by using Quick Look. You can certainly bring up the Context Menu and then go to Quick Look here. But the easiest way to do it is just select the file, hit the spacebar, and it brings up the Quick Look window. The Quick Look window can be resized. You can even go full screen if you like, like that. And the Quick Look window will stay up until you dismiss it. So you can select another image here in the Finder and you can see how you can continue to view images. As a matter of fact you can use the arrow keys here in the Finder and going down will just go to the next image. I can flip through images in a folder really easily and view them using Quick Look. Note also that Quick Look has access to the Markup Tools here and the Rotate Tool there. 
Now another thing you can do with the Quick Look tool is if you right click or two-finger click on a trackpad you have the ability to Copy the subject here. So similar to removing the background. You can see here there's even a glowing line around the subject there so it shows what you'll get if you use Copy. That is now on the Clipboard and you can Paste it somewhere else.
Another thing you can do with Quick Look is if there is an image with some text in it you can go into Quick Look and you'll see this little text button here at the bottom right. You can use this to select the text that is there. You could actually just use your pointer and select if you want. But if you click this it makes it clear what text in the image has been recognized. With this text selected you can use Command C to Copy the text and it is just plain text you can paste elsewhere. You also have a Translate Button here if it is not in your language. 
Another trick you can do in Quick Look is you're looking at an image and something in it has been identified. In this case it is a monument. You'll see that there's this Info Button that appears here. You can click that and it will actually give you information about what it has found in the photo.Here's another example. This picture of a flower also comes up with an Info Button. You click that and it will try to identify that plant. 
Here might be the most powerful image you can do without any app. You can select an image, I'll choose this one here, and you can convert it to a PDF. So if you wanted to send this as a PDF to somebody you don't have to open it up in an app and export it as a PDF or anything like that. You can go to the Quick Actions and choose Create PDF.When you do that it simply creates a PDF file. Now what's even cooler is you can select multiple images. So I'll select these 3 and you can do to the same Quick Actions and notice it is also available here because it is the second in the list here. So I can click Create PDF here and it has created a PDF that uses the name of the first one but look what happens when I open it up. You can see it's got all three images in the PDF each as its own page. What's even cooler is that you can decide the order. So I've got this image here, this one here, and this one here. I'll choose the one of me first. Then Command Click to choose the flower second and then Command Click to choose the lantern third. So now when I create a PDF, if I look at the order, notice it does it in the order in which I selected them. 
Also for image files you can get a lot of information using just the Finder without opening an app. So with an image selected I can go to File and then Get Info or simply Command i and then under More Info here, a section that you can Open and Close, I'm going to get things like the dimensions, the make and model of the camera used, and all sorts of different settings for when the photo was taken. 
Of course there's even more you can do if you open up an image in an app, like Preview, or you create your own shortcut in the Shortcuts App can do lots of different things there as well. You can also do things like, of course, Share the image in various different ways, sending it over AirDrop, adding to Notes, all of that. That all can be done as well. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: One Response to “Everything You Can Do With Images Without Launching an App”

Mario Paris-Fernández

9 months ago

Great. Thank you very much.

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Everything You Can Do With Images Without Launching an App

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