9 Hidden Apple Preview Features That Replace Paid Tools

If you’ve ever paid for a PDF editor or image app for your Mac, there’s a good chance you spent money you didn’t need to.

Apple’s Preview app can replace some paid tools

Apple’s Preview app does a lot more than most people realize, and it’s already sitting on every Mac. Most of us only use it to open PDFs or take a quick look at a photo, then close it again without a second thought.

But it can do all kinds of other things:

• Sign documents
• Fill out forms
• Redact sensitive information
• Combine PDFs
• Remove backgrounds from images

…and a bunch of other things you used to need a paid app for.

The Markup Toolbar Is Where Everything Lives

Most of Preview’s useful tools are tucked behind one button on the toolbar — the one that looks like a marker. Click it and a second row of tools appears underneath.

Markup button on Preview’s toolbar

If you’re not sure what a particular tool does, just hover your mouse pointer over it and Preview will tell you.

Securely Redact Sensitive Information

With some tools, the redaction mark is just a graphic sitting over the text, and anyone who knows what they’re doing can pull it off and read what was hidden. With Preview, once you save the redacted document, that information is gone for good.

Redacting information in a PDF document with Preview

With some tools, the redaction mark is just a graphic sitting over the text, and anyone who knows what they’re doing can pull it off and read what was hidden. With Preview, once you save the redacted document, that information is gone for good.

Fill Out Forms Without Typing Everything

Assuming you’ve filled out the details in your contact card, of course.

Click into a form field and you’ll get a popup with your own contact card as the default. Click it and Preview drops in your information — name, address, and so on. If you need to fill the form in for someone else in your contacts, select Choose Other and pick them from the list.

It’s not always perfect. Sometimes it gets mixed up about what a form field is asking for so you should always double check that everything landed in the right place. But it saves a lot of typing when you’ve got a long form to get through.

Automatically filling your personal info on forms in Preview

It’s not always perfect. Sometimes it gets mixed up about what a form field is asking for so you should always double check that everything landed in the right place. But it saves a lot of typing when you’ve got a long form to get through.

1. Using a trackpad. If you’re on a MacBook or have a separate trackpad, you can sign with your finger. Click to start, then draw your signature on the trackpad — it shows up on screen as you go. While you’re doing this, the trackpad stops acting as your mouse, so when you’re done you just press any key on the keyboard to save it.

2. Using the camera. Sign a white sheet of paper, hold it up to your Mac’s camera, and Preview will scan the signature off the page.

3. Using your iPhone or iPad. You can also sign on your phone or tablet with your finger, or in the case of an iPad, with an Apple Pencil if you’ve got one.

Once a signature is saved, you just click it to drop it into a document, then drag it into position and resize it to fit the signature box.

If you want to delete a saved signature, hover over it in the dropdown and click the X. There’s no confirmation and no warning, so just be careful you don’t remove one by accident.

Using the signature tool in Preview

Combine, Rearrange, and Delete PDF Pages

You can drag pages into a different order to rearrange them or you can drag pages between two open documents to combine them. If you’ve got two or three separate PDFs you want to merge into one, open them side by side, set the sidebars to thumbnails, and drag pages from one into the other.

Choosing the sidebar layout in Preview

Deleting pages is just as easy — click the thumbnail in the sidebar and either use Edit → Delete or press the delete key.

Lock Down a PDF With Permissions

And you can set the same kind of permissions on your own PDFs.

Click the ‘i’ icon in the toolbar to open the inspector, and the lock icon at the top shows you which permissions are set. To change them, go to File → Export, then click the Permissions button before you save.

PDF permissions options in Preview’s export settings

You’ve got two password options. The top one asks for a password before anyone can even open the file. The second — the owner password — controls what people can do once it’s open, like whether they’re allowed to print it or add annotations and signatures.

Check the permissions you want to allow and leave the ones you don’t unchecked.

For example, if you wanted to stop someone from printing a document or signing it, you’d check everything else, set an owner password, and export. Anyone who opens it afterward will find those options locked and not available.

If you need to update a locked document, you can unlock it again by entering the password.

Shrink a File That’s Too Big to Upload

Ever tried to upload a PDF somewhere and been told it’s over the size limit? Preview can help with that too.

Go to File → Export and open the Quartz Filter dropdown, then choose Reduce File Size. There’s no preview of how much you’ll save — you just have to save it and check — but it compresses whatever it can without losing the information in the document.

Reduce File Size option on the Quartz Filter dropdown when exporting a PDF in Preview

In one of my own tests, the same document went from 6.1 MB down to 5.3 MB. Not a huge difference, but often it’s enough to get you under a file size limit.

Fill In a Form and Reply Straight From Email

If someone emails you a PDF form, you can open it right from Apple Mail, fill it in with Preview, and reply with the completed form attached — without ever saving the file to your desktop.

When you go to save, Preview asks what you want to do: reply to the original email with the form attached, start a new email, or just save the file. Choose reply and it builds the email for you, with the filled-in form already attached.

It Does Images, Too

Most people end up using Preview for opening PDFs but it can do a fair bit with images as well. It’s not going to replace apps like Photoshop or Pixelmator, but for the everyday stuff, it’s more than capable.

Remove a Background in One Click

Preview has a background removal tool built right in — it’s the icon beside the rotate button.

Remove background tool on Preview’s toolbar

Click it and Preview strips the background out from behind your subject. It won’t be as clean as a dedicated app, and if you zoom in you’ll see it loses some fine detail around the edges. But for something like a profile picture, where the image gets shrunk down anyway, it’s more than good enough.

The tool is greyed out on some photos where it can’t recognize what’s in the foreground and what’s in the background. If you don’t see it active, the image just isn’t one it can work with.

Strip Location Data Before You Share a Photo

This one is more of a privacy tip than an editing trick, but it’s worth knowing.

Most photos from your iPhone (or a digital camera) carry a lot of hidden information — lens details, resolution, and often the exact location where the shot was taken. Click the ‘i’ icon on the toolbar to open the inspector, then look under the info tab for the GPS section and Preview will show you where the photo was taken on a map.

Example location info in an image

If you’re sending a photo to someone and you’d rather not hand over that information, there’s a button to remove it. Save the edited image and that information is gone.

The App You Already Paid For

Preview rarely gets the attention some of Apple’s other apps do. But it’s a genuinely capable tool, it’s built into every Mac, iPhone, and iPad, and it might save you a few bucks on paid apps.

Apple has a good online manual for it if you want to dig deeper.

If you’d rather see all of this in action, I walk through it step-by-step in this video:

[embed]

My newsletter helps you remove friction in your life and get organized using the apps you already have. You can get it here.