Apr 27 2009
Preview.app Thumbnailing
By: Jon Gales
It’s been a little while since a real PowerUser Monday has been posted. Two
weeks ago was Easter and even though I love writing this column, I still need
a day off every once in a while. Last week was the big announcement from Apple–iTunes
Music Store. In leue of a column I hosted a live chat from the Apple Store
here in Tampa, FL. It was a huge sucess and we filled up 3 AIM chat rooms with
a 4th one going strong.
Onto the real column… How many times have you had a bunch of images you
wanted to view really quickly? After I load up images from a digital camera,
the first thing I want to do is view them all at a reasonable size. The preview
box in column mode is a start, but it’s too small for my tastes. There’s a
hidden feature in Preview.app that can do this… It rocks.
First, open up a folder that has some images/documents (they can be anything
Preview.app can handle: .pdf, .psd, .gif, .jpg, .tiff, .whateverthehell). Next,
select
the ones you want to preview and open them with Preview.app (if they aren’t
set
to open
in Preview.app by default, you can control/right-click and hit Open With >
Preview or you can drag them to
Preview.app’s
icon). There is no step three.
What you see is a beautiful Cocoa drawer full
of your images/documents. You can use the back or forward buttons to move
through the images, use the key commands command-left arrow and command-right
arrow,
or just click on the one you want to see (for you visual people.. I know you’re
out there).
Here’s what I got when I opened up four pictures of my friend Luccia:
To see it full size just click on it. The forward/backward buttons I mentioned
aren’t on the screen shot because I made the window narrow to make a better
shot. By default they are located after the rotate buttons (I can still get
to them by using the menu icon >>>).
That’s it for this week!