Click on the Apple menu and choose System Settings.It’s possible that the version of macOS running on your Mac has a bug that has been fixed in the later version and that's causing Preview not to work. If a regular Restart from the Apple menu doesn’t solve the problem, try shutting down your Mac, waiting a few seconds, and then starting it up again. It fixes problems with apps and clears out RAM or temporary files. Sometimes quick restart can solve all your problems. If you see Preview near the top, select it and press 'X' to quit it.Click the CPU column header to order processes by the CPU cycles they are consuming.Open your Applications folder, then Utilities, and launch Activity Monitor.If so, use the ’Stop’ button in Activity Monitor’s toolbar to shut down processes that are causing problems. If you launch Preview again, it might actually work as it normally does.īut if after relaunching Preview it’s still unresponsive, use Activity Monitor to check if it’s consuming an excessive amount of resources. To do that, press Command-Option-Escape, choose Preview from the list of apps and then click Force Quit.

In case your Preview freezes and becomes completely unresponsive, it’s time to use Force Quit. If the rest of the files work, you’ll know that the problem is with the patient zero. Meaning, before you try anything else, try opening several different files to see what happens. What appears to be a problem with Preview, may actually be a corrupt file. If you’ve encountered the problems listed above or have other issues with Preview, try the solutions listed below to resolve them. How to fix it when Preview is not working on your Mac

There are several cases that indicate that Preview is not working properly. In this article, we’ll explain what to do to not feel this way again. So when Preview is not working - you might feel a bit lost. Often, such basic functionality is all you need when working with files. Over the years, Preview has gone from being an app for viewing files to the one that now allows annotation and even editing. If you double-click a PDF, jpg, or png file on Mac without changing settings, it will automatically open in Preview. Preview is a built-in app in macOS and a default app on Mac to view PDFs or image files. But to help you do it all by yourself, we’ve gathered our best ideas and solutions below.įeatures described in this article refer to the MacPaw site version of CleanMyMac X. So here’s a tip for you: Download CleanMyMac to quickly solve some of the issues mentioned in this article.

Scan using preview mac os x