April 28th, 2014

Almost every consumer computer comes preinstalled with software that I seem to never use. Often euphemistically referred to as bloatware, these “tools” clog up my hard drive and slowdown productivity (I’m looking at you “Messages“). Mac Preview has never been a favorite tool of mine, but it has recent “come into its own”, by actually adding some useful functionality. These functions include image viewing, pdf viewing, pdf mark-up and most recently image manipulation. Today we are going to learn how to crop an image with Preview. For those of us who make computer based presentations (PPTs, Keynote, etc.), image cropping is one of the most common, and important, tasks we perform.

With Preview, it is no longer necessary to buy dedicated, and expensive, image manipulation software…unless you need to do something fancy.

[title size=”2″]Image Cropping Demo[/title]

[title size=”2″]Notes[/title]

  • At Music Toolbox we primarily focus on Mac tools. This is for two reasons: most of our audience uses Macs, and it’s all I have! That being said, Windows Photo Gallery will perform many of the same functions. Check out cropping on the PC here.
  • OS X “Mavericks” (the most recent version of the Mac OS)  has done away with the “save as” function in most of their applications, in favor of continuous automatic file saving. This integrates well with the “time machine” functionality, and is annoying as hell. Before you start editing an image ask yourself the following question: “Will I ever want to use the unmanipulated version of this image again“. If your answer is yes, I would suggest making a copy of the image file before you start editing it, but once you start Maverick will auto save the changed image over the original file.
  • The quickest way duplicate a files is to select the file then “copy” (cmd – c) and “paste” (cmd – p).