Using the Preview Pane in Yosemite

Before Yosemite, the preview pane was only a part of the Finder's column view. But now you can use it in icon and list view as well. This makes it easy to move through a collection of photos or other documents to select the one you want. You can even watch videos or listen to audio with the preview pane. You can also look inside folders and select an item with the keyboard.

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Video Transcript: Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. On today's episode let's take a look at using the Preview Pane in the Finder.
The Preview Pane was in previous versions of Mac OS 10 but only in the column view. So here we are in the column view and we can see the preview over here of the file selected. So it is an image so it shows me a preview of the image. If it was a text file we would see a preview of the text file.
Underneath we would see a whole bunch of different information. What information you see depends on what type of file it is. But you usually always see the Created, Modified, and Last opened times for it and also the file kind here and a large representation of the file name.
Now what is new with Yosemite is the Preview Pane is also available in other views. For instance, let's go to a List View here. In List View typically you wouldn't see the Preview Pane. But now we have the option to go to View, Show Preview, and you see we get the Preview Pane here even though we are in List View.
We can expand this by moving the right side over to get more space for the entire window and then moving the line here to make this larger. So now we can use the arrow keys to go through the files here and see previews of these files.
You also get it in Icon View. Switch to Icon View and it is there. If you don't see it there right away you know to go to View and you can Hide or Show Preview right here. You can also use shift Command P to do that. So you can do it in all the different views. You can get Preview view now which you couldn't do before.
Now this makes browsing through a bunch of images very easy in any of these views. Say List View here. You just click on another image or use the arrow keys to move up and down.
But it also works for other file types. So if you have a bunch of text files to get these previewed of it, even some standard files like Numbers, Pages, Keynote, you get a preview that you can see.
Now for media files you actually can preview the media as well. I can select this audio file here. Of course there is nothing to show visually, it just shows these musical notes here, but there is a play button I can rollover and actually hit Play and it will play the music. You can see the progress there going around in a circle.
Also notice the information here it different. I've actually got the duration and the sample rate for this music here instead say if I select an image then I get the dimensions for it. This also works, of course, for videos. The videos there I can play and it will play the video and here I get the Dimensions and Duration for that.
Another thing you can do with the Preview Pane area is use Add Tags to quickly add tags, the standard colored ones or your own custom ones, to whatever is selected. You can, of course, do that in many other ways. Through the Menu Bar, you can do it through this Tags button here if you have that. But it can be very easy to go through a whole collection of things, like a collection of images, and add tags to them using the Preview Pane.
You can also use the large representation of the file here to Open it instead of having to click on this little line here you can double click here and it will open up the file. If you are ready to move beyond this view and want something a little bit bigger you can, of course, with the file selected hit the Spacebar and it will bring up Quick Look.
Quick Look gives you that same kind of preview but now you can adjust it very easily and this stays around. So I can now select this file here and arrow down and you can see it updates just as the Preview Pane does as well. So there is just different ways to preview the stuff.

Using the Preview Pane in Yosemite

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