• Mac What Is Preview Apps
• Mac Preview App Not Responding
• Mac What Is Preview Application

There’s a frustrating issue with macOS, where the app you’re using stops working and spits out an error message saying it isn’t open anymore. This mostly happens with Preview, but it can affect any app on your Mac, including Finder, Safari, the App Store, and others.

After manual terminating the finder process, the preview app now works fine for all file types. Posted by jp112sdl. Sep 19, 2019  There are two ways to Force Quit an app in macOS: using the Force Quit window or using Activity Monitor. If either of these methods works, make sure you reboot your Mac before opening Preview again. How do I close Preview using the Force Quit window? Press the command+option+escape keys to open the Force Quit window. The Mac App Store product page includes features that help drive discovery and downloads of your app. You can add up to three app preview videos per localization to show your Mac app in action and highlight its key features and functionality. App previews autoplay on the Mac App Store, making them even more useful in helping customers learn.

Mac What Is Preview Apps

When this error occurs, the app you’re using becomes unresponsive and the following alert pops up:

Despite the error message, your app still appears as though it’s open. There may be a dot beneath it in the Dock or it may still have open windows. But you’re unable to use it. With Preview, that means you can’t open PDFs, screenshots, or other images anymore!

This article explains how to fix this error and get your apps working again. We’ve even gone so far as explaining how to fully reinstall macOS, in case this issue keeps cropping up again and again.

Mac Preview App Not Responding

Contents

• 1 Quick Tips
• 2 Step 1. Force Quit Preview
• 3 Step 2. Reboot your Mac
• 4 Step 3. Remove your Preview preferences
• 5 Step 4. Update or reinstall macOS

Quick Tips

Here are the basic steps to fix Preview when macOS tells you it’s not open anymore, we’ve explained each step more fully in the article below:

1. Force Quit Preview using command+option+escape.
2. Reboot your Mac, using a hard reboot if necessary.
3. Remove your Preview preferences from the Library.
4. Update and then reinstall macOS using Recovery Mode.

Related:

Step 1. Force Quit Preview

The first thing to try and do — although it doesn’t always work for this error — is to close the unresponsive app. Despite the error message telling you Preview “is not open anymore,” it usually is. But it has frozen and needs to be reopened.

There are two ways to Force Quit an app in macOS: using the Force Quit window or using Activity Monitor. If either of these methods works, make sure you reboot your Mac before opening Preview again.

How do I close Preview using the Force Quit window?

1. Press the command+option+escape keys to open the Force Quit window.
2. If the escape key on your Touch Bar is unresponsive, go to  > Force Quit from the menu bar.
3. Select Preview from the list of applications.
4. Click Force Quit, then reboot your Mac.

Mac What Is Preview Application

How do I close Preview using Activity Monitor?

1. Open the Activity Monitor application in one of these ways:
   1. Go to Finder > Applications > Utilities.
   2. Or go to Launchpad > Other.
2. Select the CPU tab, then click ‘Process Name’ to sort the processes.
3. Find and select Preview in the list of processes.
4. Click the stop sign button in the top-left of Activity Monitor.
5. Choose Force Quit, then reboot your Mac.

Step 2. Reboot your Mac

If it’s not possible to close Preview using Force Quit or Activity Monitor, you can close it by rebooting your Mac instead. This forces any apps that macOS says are not open to restart, bypassing the error message.

The safest way to reboot your Mac is using a soft reboot, but that may not be possible if the unresponsive app cannot close. If that’s the case, you have no choice but to use a hard reboot. We’ve explained both reboots below.

How do I soft reboot my Mac?

1. From the menu bar, go to  > Shut Down.
2. Uncheck the box to reopen windows when logging back in.
3. Confirm you want to Shut Down.
4. Wait at least 30 seconds for your Mac to power off.
5. Briefly press the power button to turn your Mac on again.

How do I hard reboot my Mac?

1. Performing a hard reboot may result in lost data or corrupt files. If possible, save your documents and back up your Mac first.
2. Press and hold the power button for 10 seconds or so until the screen goes black.
3. Wait 30 seconds, then briefly press the power button again to restart your Mac
4. In the alert window that appears, click Cancel to avoid reopening any apps.

Step 3. Remove your Preview preferences

If you still get the same error message — ‘The application “Preview.app” is not open anymore’ — you may need to remove some of your preference files.

Download apps safely from the Mac App Store. And the internet.Now apps from both the App Store and the internet can be installed worry-free. Gatekeeper on your Mac ensures that all apps from the internet have already been checked by Apple for known malicious code — before you run them the first time. App Review makes sure each app in the App Store is reviewed before it’s accepted. Does mac need antivirus software protection.

These are small files that macOS automatically creates to store your settings for each application. You can usually remove them without losing any data or causing problems, but we recommend you back up your Mac first just in case.

Follow each of the suggestions below, testing Preview again after each one.

We advise you to move the preference files to a new folder on your Desktop for safekeeping, that way you can always put them back if something goes wrong. If this works and your issue is fixed, go ahead and delete those preference files.

How do I remove my Preview preferences?

1. Open Finder, then from the menu bar select Go > Go to Folder.
2. Type the following location and click Go:
   ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Preview.plist
3. Move the highlighted preferences file to your Desktop for safekeeping.
4. Reboot your Mac and test Preview again.
5. If the error persists, repeat the steps above for each of the following files:
   1. ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.Preview
   2. ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.quicklook.ui.helper
   3. ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Preview.LSSharedFileList.plist
   4. ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Preview.SandboxedPersistentURLs.LSSharedFileList.plist
   5. ~/Library/Saved Application State/com.apple.Preview.savedState

Step 4. Update or reinstall macOS

Hopefully, that’s all you need to resolve the ‘“Preview.app” is not open anymore’ errors. But if you’re still experiencing problems, there might be a bug in your operating software. You can fix this by updating or reinstalling macOS.

We suggest you update your Mac to the latest version of macOS first. Apple frequently releases patch updates to fix bugs like this, but you can’t benefit from them if you don’t keep your machine up-to-date.

If you’re already running the latest version of macOS or if an update doesn’t solve anything, you need to reinstall macOS using Recovery Mode. This shouldn’t affect your data — although we recommend you back up your Mac first anyway.

Reinstalling macOS rewrites every line of code in the operating software on your Mac.

How do I update to the latest release of macOS?

1. Connect your Mac to a working Internet connection.
2. Go to System Preferences > Software Update to check for new updates.
3. Download and install any updates your Mac finds.

How do I reinstall macOS?

1. If you haven’t already, make a new backup using Time Machine.
2. Use the following instructions to boot your Mac into Recovery Mode:
   1. Go to  > Shut Down and confirm you want to Shut Down you Mac.
   2. Wait 30 seconds for your Mac to fully power off.
   3. Briefly press the power button, then immediately hold command+R.
3. When the Recovery Mode screen appears, click Reinstall macOS.
4. Follow the on-screen prompts to complete the macOS reinstallation.

Fingers cross, that’s the last of the ‘“Preview.app” is not open anymore’ messages. Check out this post if you need more help with crashing apps on your Mac.

And let us know in the comments if you found these suggestions helpful!

Dan is a freelance writer based in South West England.

He spent two years supervising repairs as a Genius Admin for Apple Retail and uses that knowledge to keep our troubleshooting guides up to date.

Long before that, Dan turned to Apple products from a musical background. Having owned iPods for years, he bought a MacBook to learn sound recording and production. It was using those skills that he gained a first-class Bachelor of Science in Sound Technology.

You can use the pen tool to draw on image and PDFs in Preview. Rough shapes and lines will be converted to smooth and perfect shapes and lines, but you can always choose the freehand drawing instead. You can move, resize and change the properties of shapes after you draw them.

Check out Drawing Shapes in Preview at YouTube for closed captioning and more options.

Video Transcript: You probably already know that if you open an image in the Preview app or even a PDF you can draw on it. You click on the Markup tools here, get all these extra tools, and do various things.The Pen tool is particularly interesting because you can draw freehand on the image. So let's select that. I've also selected the color red here. So we can draw something. Let's try to draw a circle. You can see I'm drawing a rough circle. Not perfect. But when I release you can see I get a perfect circle.Now you have a choice here at this point. You can use this perfect circle that has been substituted for your rough one or you can go over here to this little dropdown menu that has appeared and select between your original rough circle or the perfect one. Go to either one, select it, and now that's there. So you have the option of drawing a perfect shape or the rough shape. You can do this for a variety of shapes. For instance, I can do a square and you can see it makes it perfect but I can select the rough one. Let's select the rough one there. You can do a line. Actually that did it as a curve because me line was so bad. But here's a line and you can see there. You could do triangles. You could do even arrows, an arrowhead on the end here, and you can see it actually converts that to an arrow. I have the option here, under the line properties, to actually remove the arrowhead or change its direction. All sorts of things and, of course, I can also change the thickness of the line. Everything afterwards.So let's look at more shapes. You can do a pentagon and it corrects it. Again I have the option here of what I want to do. You can do an oval and you can even do an oval on an angle and we'll get that. So you have lots of different things. Even a star works. See it recognizes that shape. That's pretty much it. There are probably a few others but the ones I played around with, these are the ones that it recognizes and it gives you the option of which one to choose.Sometimes you even get more than two options. Like if you try to confuse it. Draw a shape like this and you notice here I get three options. The original. It interprets it as maybe a curve, and maybe also interprets it as kind of a talk bubble here. It's trying to figure out what it is that you want. You can get some clues as to other things that you can do. So, for instance, let's see if it thinks that a talk bubble is right. There, you can see you can do this simple talk bubble here or just an oval with a line. There's even like curves like that. So I get these options here. I can try and draw a more perfect semi-circle. You can always adjust it afterwards by grabbing different points in the curve.Now what you can do that is really cool at this point once you have all these shapes here is, of course, you can select them and do different things with them. You have to go over them until you get the hand cursor which works better on some shapes than others. You can also go to Tools and Show Inspector and here, if you click on the pencil tool here, you get a list of all the different shapes. As you select them it selects them on the screen there. After they're all drawn there's nothing you can do to change them back to the original drawings or force it to smooth them or anything like that. But you can change the color. You can change the Fill. You can change the line thickness. Things like that. For some shapes you can change other things like the type of line for the arrow here. Of course you can change arrow properties and in most you can also add or move a shadow there as well. So you have some things that you can do with them after you're done drawing them.Of course you can also select, drag them around. You can grab a corner and resize. So once you're done if you Save there and you close it when you reopen you end up with the shapes there that are now permanent. They're no longer there as something that can be edited. So if you go, for instance, to Tools, Inspector and look now there you see that there are no shapes because these have been permanently applied. The reason for this is because this is a JPEG image andJPEG images are bitmap images. They don't have the ability to remember things like different shapes and all. So as long as you're still editing the original document then you have this extra layer that's there in Preview. But as soon as you Save the JPEG then you simply get a JPEG which means that you can't edit it any longer. However, of course, since you're using Preview which is a modern MAC app you can do a File, Revert to, Browse all versions and go back to a previous version of this image here so you can get rid of all of that. Go back to the JPEG image as it was and start over.