A lot of OS X’s built in software got improvements in Leopard, but perhaps none so much as Preview. Among the most basic pieces of software on in OS X, Preview has finally started to grow into a reasonable application for viewing photos and working with PDFs. It may not be as full featured as Adobe Acrobat, or offer the kind of sophisticated image tweaking as Photoshop, but at least it’s finally turning into something that doesn’t seem to actively work against you.
The cool cats over at Lifehacker have put together an excellent list of some of Preview’s big new features, such as the Instant Alpha tool that lets you remove backgrounds, the ability to adjust an image’s colors (and even an Auto Color option), and combining PDFs (that is a godsend). Other features include the ability to annotate or highlight text in a PDF and crop, resize, and flip pictures.
That’s all pretty cool, but the Ogle Earth blog points out another nifty feature of Preview that geotaggers will appreciate it. If you open the Inspector (command-I) and go to the More Info tab (the one with the exclamation point), and your photo contains metadata about the photo’s location, Preview will give you the longitude and latitude and show you a map. A Locate button at the bottom will even open your web browser and take you to a Google Map of the location.
Just goes to remind us that there’s nothing we love more than Google and Apple when they get together.
