You most likely use it all the time, but you probably don’t even have its icon in your Dock. And, especially if you’re running Mac OS X “Tiger” (and you should be, you know), you probably haven’t scratched the surface of what this application can do for you. I’m talking, of course, about “Preview”.

Preview is Mac OS X’s default application for viewing images (JPEG, GIF, TIFF, PICT, PNG, and other image file formats) and PDF files. It lives in your Applications folder and bears the icon of a photo with the loupe on top of it. You’ll also notice that (unless you’ve changed it in the Get Info window – we’ll talk about that some other time), image and PDF files on your Mac bear the photo-and-loupe icon as well, meaning that double-clicking them will open them in Preview, which is good.

Let’s talk photos first. We’ve all double-clicked a photo, and seen it open in a Preview window. But did you know you can use Preview to view a group of photos? Simply drag-select and group of photos and drop them on the Preview icon in the Dock or Finder. Preview opens with the first photo displayed, and a Drawer opens on the side containing thumbnails of the other photos in the group. Scroll or step down through the thumbnails, and the selected thumbnail appears full-size in the main window. You can also get to Tiger’s gorgeous integrated Slideshow feature by simply selecting “Slideshow” from the View menu.

Need to adjust the photo? No need to use an expensive image editor, or even drop it into iPhoto. Select “Image Correction” from the Tools menu, and you’ll get a palette similar to the “Adjust” window in iPhoto (sans the histogram). Make the corrections (viewed in real time), and then Save or Save As any of a number of image formats. Preview can also crop an image.

Preview is also a lightning-fast PDF viewer. Open a multi-page PDF document, and the Drawer shows thumbnails of the individual pages, as well as Search field. Tiger’s Preview gains the ability to Automatically Resize the contents of a document by dragging and making the window larger on your screen. This is so much more convenient than the Zoom In/Zoom Out buttons (which are still available).

Take some time and give Preview a workout.

© 2005 Peter F. Zimowski