12 Things You May Not Know You Can Do With Images In Mac Preview

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.

Video Transcript: HI this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you ten things you may not know that you can do with images in the Preview app. 
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So we've all used the Preview app to look at images and pdf's. There's a lot of things you can do with both. You may know some of the things you can do with images like, say, add annotations. But there are a lot of other features of Preview which you may not know about. 
First, let me show you that you can use Preview to import photos directly from your camera. You connect your camera to your Mac or the SD card to a SD card reader to your Mac. Then you could run Preview and go to File and then Import. In this case I have an SD card from my camera connected and I'm going to get a list of photos and videos on my card. I can see information about them. I can select one. I can import it. I can Command Select to select multiple or Shift Select to select a range. I can import them all. I could also select an individual one and remove it. I could go with this List View here or a Grid View here at the bottom as well. 
You can also use Preview to scan directly from a scanner that's connected to your Mac. You don't have to use the software that came with your scanner. So you can go, in Preview, to File and then you should see your scanner if it's connected here. Then you could bring it up and you can get a preview. Then you can select all sorts of options here on the right. You can select an area to scan. Then you can scan and it will go directly into a new document in Preview. From there you can Save it. 
Now when you open up an image in Preview one of the many things you can do with the image is you can adjust the colors. So with the image open just go to Tools. Then Adjust Color and it brings up these controls here that are similar to what you find in a lot of graphics apps. So you don't necessarily have to open the image in a graphics app to do some simple adjustments. You could adjust the exposure. You can adjust contrast, highlights, shadows, the color saturation. All sorts of things. There's an Auto setting here. You can also play with the levels yourself manually at the top. Then when you're done Save and your changes will be saved directly to the image.
You can also export an image in Preview to another format or to a different compression level. So let's go to File and Export. Then here you can see I can export and I can choose a format. There are a bunch of different formats. The new HEIC format. JPEG, PNG, TIFF. Some of these have controls. Like JPEG, for instance, has a quality control. Lower quality means a smaller file size. You can see 1.3MG but of course less quality. Higher quality is going to mean a much larger file but the image will look better.
The one thing that's missing here is the ability to export at a different size. But you can change the size of the photo before you export. So go to Tools and Adjust Size. It brings up this whole control here where you can change the width, height, and pixels. You've got Pixels, Percent, Inches, and other measurements as well. So you can go to Percent. Let's go to 50% here. You can unlock the width and height so you can basically stretch it out horizontally or vertically. You can also Crop an image. To do that simply just select an area of the image and you can adjust using these blue dots here to get to exactly where you want and then go to Tools and Crop or Command K and it will crop to that. Then you can Export and only get this portion of the image.
Now Preview has the ability to actually get information about the image that you're seeing. If you go to Tools, Show Inspector or Command i you have several different tabs here of information. So click on i here at the top. You've got general information. You have information from your camera. You've got picture metadata. All sorts of different things you could look at. You can also click here  to look at File information as well. 
Now if you want to be precise about your colors you can get a preview of what this image will look like if you display it on a certain screen or print it on certain paper using a certain printer there's a tool for that in here. You can go to View, then Soft Proof with Profile. All these different profiles will appear. You'll probably see different ones depending upon what you have installed or connected to your Mac. So you could choose a different profile here and it will slightly change the colors that you see on the screen. If you use it make sure you turn it off when you're done. Go back and select None.
Now Preview can do slideshows. The way to get a slideshow going is to open many images in Preview. So I'm going to select All here and do Command O to open them. It will open them all up in Preview. So now that I've got a bunch here I can see them on the left. If you don't see them you can turn on the Thumbnails here. Then you can go to View, and Slideshow. It will show it as a full screen slideshow. It's automatically playing so you'll see it fade from one image to the next. You can also click the Pause button here at the bottom and X to exit. You can use the arrow keys to flip through the images very quickly. 
You can also cut out part of an image and use it in another image. There are several different ways to do this. Click on here to turn on the Annotations tool and then you can select a way to do something. So you can do rectangular or say an elliptical selection. So I can take a select like this and then I can do Command C to copy. Go to another image and click on the image to select it but then Command V to paste and you see I get this floating object here. If you want to be more precise you can select either the Lasso selection tool or the Smart Lasso tool to outline an image. So you can see here I've outlined myself. The Smart Lasso tool will cling to the edges. I can Command C to copy and go to another image here and click on it. Then Command V to paste and now I can paste this selection into this new image on top of it.
If you want to highlight something in an image you have two options. You can go to Tools and then Annotate and you have Mask and Loops. You can also access those if you turn on Annotations tools and then you go to the Shapes and they're at the bottom. So Mask puts a rectangle here. You can adjust the edges and corners of it. Then you can position it to highlight what you want and the rest of the image is darker. You can do the Loop as a circle here and you've got these two dots. The blue dot will enlarge the size of the circle. The green dot will increase the magnification inside the circle. You can also add more than one of these loops if you want. 
If you have a bunch of images open in Preview at the same time and they're in the left sidebar here you can go to a different view called Contact Sheet. This will show you small square thumbnails of each image. You can double click on one and you can then go into it. You can jump back to the Contact Sheet to see them all. Note there's a keyboard shortcut for that. Option Command 6. So I can go into here and then Option Command 6 to go back to the Contact Sheet. 
So in addition to these items there's, of course, the full set of annotation tools that you can use to markup your images in Preview.

Comments: 5 Responses to “12 Things You May Not Know You Can Do With Images In Mac Preview”

Caro

4 years ago

I thought I knew about Preview, but this was full of eye-openers. Another great, helpful video—thanks, Gary! 😃

Edward

Great: Can one copy/paste the edited images on Preview such as annotated shapes, be them mask or magnified on to a photo in the photo app.

Gary Rosenzweig

Edward: If you are looking to markup a photo in photos with the Markup tools, you can do that right in the Photos app. No need to use Preview.

Lindy

Gary ....you are amazing! I agree 100% with Caro's comments. I use a lot of these features daily but WOW... you added some options ( especially in the Annotate menu) that I never knew about. ( who reads documentation, eh?) I had used it to add my signature to Preview for using in letters or PDFs. But that was it. FAB-BU-LUS. THANKS. ( Some times you don't want to open a full fledged image editor to do a quick change... Preview is grrrrreat.

Anne Burke

That is brilliant Gary, thank you for always enlightening me, so much to learn.

Comments Closed.

12 Things You May Not Know You Can Do With Images In Mac Preview

Comments: 5 Responses to “12 Things You May Not Know You Can Do With Images In Mac Preview”

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