MacMost: Preview

There are lots of ways to use the PDF button that is hidden in the Print Dialog of most apps. You can use it to print part of a document or page, export as an image, send directly to Mail and much more.

If you need to change several image files at once, adjusting their sizes and maybe exporting in a new format, you can do it with Preview on your Mac.

Many Mac users have Adobe Reader on their Macs so they can read and fill out PDF files. But macOS already has a very capable PDF app named Preview. Most people will find it more than capable for all of their needs, and perhaps a little faster and convenient. If Adobe Reader is set as your default PDF app, I'll show you how to switch back to using Preview.

Sometimes you need to create PDF documents that are small enough to upload or submit with a size restriction. You can use Preview to compress the images in a PDF file, but you get better results with more control if you work with the images in the original document.

In Preview you can select just a portion of a PDF document. Then you can paste that into a new PDF document, another type of document, email message and more. This can be used in a variety of useful ways.

The Preview app can be used to view both image files and PDFs. You can also do quite a bit of editing on image files, such as color adjustments, cropping, copy and pasting selections, resizing, markup and exporting into another format.

Take a look at all fo the markup tools you can use in Mac Preview to annotate PDF documents, including the new redaction tool. You can use these to edit documents, leave notes for yourself, or fill in PDF forms without set form fields.

You can crop a photo using the tools that come with every Mac. If the photo is in the Photos app, you can use the cropping function in the editing tools there. If the photo is an independent file, you can use Preview or Markup Tools to crop it.

You don't have to create a document all at once in a single app. You can take different documents from different apps like Pages, Numbers, Keynote, web reports, images and more, and combine them into a single PDF using Preview. This allows you to create pages of your document in the app best suited for that content.

If you need to place a simple stamp to a PDF file on your Mac, you can do it using the markup tools available in Preview, Mail and other apps. You can reuse these stamps by creating a blank PDF just to hold them, and then copying and pasting stamps when needed.

Preview is a great tool for viewing PDF documents. But you can do much more than just viewing. You can fill in forms, even PDFs that don't have preset fillable fields. You can password-protect them, export them as images, merge documents, rearrange and delete pages and more.

Preview is a great tool for viewing image files. But you can do much more than just viewing. In addition to the annotation tools you may already be familiar with, you can also use Preview to export images into a different format, crop, resize and adjust colors. You can even import images from cameras or scanners.

One of the most powerful tools in Preview is the Smart Lasso. You can use that to quickly cut out part of an image to create a new one with a transparent background, or insert an object from one image into another. While Preview lacks a lot of the image editing tools found in more powerful apps, the Smart Lasso is probably easier to use than similar features in expensive apps.

You can add a motion effect to a 2D photo without buying expensive software. By using Preview to cut a photo into layers and Keynote to animate them, you can make a photo come to life. This simple parallax animation effect can be used on all sorts of photos to create interesting videos or animated GIFs.

You can copy pages in a PDF document in Preview and paste them to get a new document with only the pages you want. You can split a PDF into two or more smaller documents. You can also merge documents by dragging pages from one document into another.

added significant functionality to how we can control what happens after we take screenshots. While the default keyboard shortcuts remain the same, we can now choose where a screenshot is saved, or if the screenshot should automatically go to an app instead of a file. This allows you to easily name screenshots, delete ones we don't want without ever saving them, and even mark them up before saving.

You can use Preview to combine more than one image into a single image. By using a trick to start a new document, and then resizing, copying and pasting other images into the new document, you can create a collage of images. Then you can export in the format of your choice to use in video projects, online posting, and so on.

Have you every wanted to print only a portion of a web page, such as an airline ticket? Or, have you ever wanted to print or share a small portion of a Pages or Numbers document? You can do this easily by using the print function to send the document as a PDF to Preview. Then in preview you can crop out everything you don't need before printing or sharing it. A few clicks can save a lot of ink.

You can use Preview to study or for research with its simple highlighting tool. You can highlight in several colors and see a list of all of the text you have marked. You can also add notes through the document.

A little-known use for the Mac Preview app is to import photos from an iPhone, camera or SD card. This functionality is similar to using Image Capture, but coupled with Preview's ability to view and edit the photos as well. It doesn't work perfectly with iCloud Photo Library, since it is hard to know which photos are actually on your iPhone at any given time.