Preview is the built-in
image viewer and
PDF viewer of the
iOS,
iPadOS &
macOS operating system. In addition to viewing and printing
digital images and
Portable Document Format
Portable document format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating syste ...
(PDF) files, it can also edit these media types. It employs the
Aqua graphical user interface, the
Quartz
Quartz is a hard, crystalline mineral composed of silica (silicon dioxide). The Atom, atoms are linked in a continuous framework of SiO4 silicon–oxygen Tetrahedral molecular geometry, tetrahedra, with each oxygen being shared between two tet ...
graphics layer, and the ImageIO and
Core Image frameworks.
History
Like macOS, Preview originated in the
NeXTSTEP operating system by
NeXT, where it was part of every release since 1989. Between 2003 and 2005,
Apple
An apple is a round, edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus'' spp.). Fruit trees of the orchard or domestic apple (''Malus domestica''), the most widely grown in the genus, are agriculture, cultivated worldwide. The tree originated ...
claimed Preview was the "fastest PDF viewer on the planet."
Supported file types
Preview can open the following file types.
*
AI – Adobe Illustrator artwork files (if PDF content included in file)
*
BMP – Windows bitmap files
*
CR2 – Raw image file used by Canon cameras
*
DAE – Collada 3D files
*
DNG – Digital negative files
*
FAX – Faxes
*
FPX – FlashPix files
*
GIF
The Graphics Interchange Format (GIF; or , ) is a Raster graphics, bitmap Image file formats, image format that was developed by a team at the online services provider CompuServe led by American computer scientist Steve Wilhite and released ...
– Graphics Interchange Format files
*
HDR – High-dynamic-range image files
*
ICNS – Apple Icon Image files
*
ICO – Windows icon files
*
JPEG
JPEG ( , short for Joint Photographic Experts Group and sometimes retroactively referred to as JPEG 1) is a commonly used method of lossy compression for digital images, particularly for those images produced by digital photography. The degr ...
– Joint Photographic Experts Group files
*
JPEG 2000
JPEG 2000 (JP2) is an image compression standard and coding system. It was developed from 1997 to 2000 by a Joint Photographic Experts Group committee chaired by Touradj Ebrahimi (later the JPEG president), with the intention of superseding their ...
– JPEG 2000 files
*
OBJ – Wavefront 3D file
*
OpenEXR – OpenEXR files
*
PDF – Portable Document Format version 1.5 + some additional features
*
PICT –
QuickDraw image files
*
PNG – Portable Network Graphics files
*
PPM – Netpbm Color Image files
*
PNTG – MacPaint Bitmap Graphic files
*
PPT – PowerPoint files
*
PSD – Adobe Photoshop files
*
QTIF – QuickTime image files
*
RAD – Radiance 3D Scene Description files
*
RAW – Raw image files
*
SGI – Silicon Graphics Image files
*
STL – STereoLithography 3D format
*
TGA – TARGA image files
*
TIF (TIFF) – Tagged Image File Format files
*
XBM – X BitMap files
In
macOS Monterey and earlier, Preview supported the display of
EPS
An extended play (EP) is a Sound recording and reproduction, musical recording that contains more tracks than a Single (music), single but fewer than an album. Contemporary EPs generally contain up to eight tracks and have a playing time of 1 ...
and
PostScript documents using on-the-fly conversion to PDF format. However, this functionality was removed in
macOS Ventura, although users can continue to print and files by dragging them into the printer queue.
The version of Preview included with
OS X 10.3 (''Panther'') could play animated GIF images, for which an optional button could be added to the toolbar. As of
OS X 10.4 (''Tiger''), Preview lost playback functionality and animated GIF files are displayed as individual frames in a numbered sequence.
Features
Editing PDF documents
Preview can encrypt PDF documents, and restrict their use; for example, it is possible to save an encrypted PDF so that a password is required to copy data from the document, or to print it. However, encrypted PDFs cannot be edited further, so the original author should always keep an unencrypted version. A new "edit button" where the picture can be edited is introduced in Version 7. The "edit button" allows options to insert shapes, lines, do cropping, and among other things.
Some features which are otherwise only available in professional PDF editing software are provided by Preview: It is possible to extract single pages out of multi-page documents (e.g. PDF files), sort pages, and drag & drop single or multiple pages between several opened multi-page documents, or into other applications, such as attaching to an opened email message.
Editing images
Preview offers basic
image correction tools using
Core Image processing technology implemented in macOS, and other features like shape extraction, color extraction, cropping, and rotation tools. When annotating images, Preview uses vector shapes and text until the image is rasterized to JPEG, PNG or another bitmap format.
PDF and image documents can also be supplied with keywords, and are then automatically indexed using macOS's system-wide
Spotlight search engine.
Import and export
Preview can directly access image scanners supported by macOS and import images from the scanner. Preview can convert between
image formats; it can export to BMP, JP2, JPEG, PDF, PICT, PNG, SGI, TGA, and TIFF. Using macOS's print engine (based on
CUPS) it is also possible to "print into" a Postscript file, a PDF-X file or directly save the file in
iPhoto, for example scanned photos.
Beginning with Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, Preview restricts the Format option popup menu in the Save As dialog to commonly used types. It is possible to access the full format list by holding down the Option key when clicking the Format popup menu.
(GIF, ICNS, JPEG, JPEG-2000, Microsoft BMP, Microsoft Icon, OpenEXR, PDF, Photoshop, PNG, SGI, TGA, TIFF.)
See also
*
List of PDF software
References
External links
'Mac Basics: Preview app views and edits images and PDFs'AppleInsider review
from 2003
*MacProNews article: from July 2004
*Sams Publishin
sample chapter on Preview
from ''Mac OS X Panther Applications and Utilities''. Includes some instructions for use, with screenshots.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Preview (Software)
Image viewers
PDF readers
MacOS