Power User Monday Tip of the Week

Preview.app Thumbnailing

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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!