Mac OS X – Preview

Preview on Mac OS X is a very underrated application. It has been included on every version of Mac OS X I’ve ever used, which in my case goes back to ‘Tiger’ version 10.4

Now at first sight it might not seem to be able to do a lot. You use it for viewing photo and graphic files, it also handles PDF files too, no need to install Adobe Reader… (thank goodness!!) It will also let you ‘preview’ Word, Excel and a number of other document formats.

OK so it does those… but did you also know you can do a lot more too…

For images you can:

  • Rotate images in 90 degree increments
  • Flip images horizontally or vertically (Mirrored ones)
  • Adjust the size of an image (so you can reduce the size of image before emailing it or uploading it to say Facebook)
  • Adjust the colour and other parameters of an image.
  • Crop images
  • You can annotate images with squares, ovals, lines, lines with arrows etc. Useful for adding labels and notes
  • Add Text to images in different fonts, styles, colours etc.
  • You can take screen shots of images/documents which is a quick and dirty way of creating images suitable for a website when you don’t want them to be huge in resolution!
  • You can take a PDF and digitally sign the document and save it with your signature. You do your signature on a piece of paper then hold it up to the camera.

I use Preview many times a day, it is a built in application that I couldn’t do without.