Preview is locking me out of my own PDFs, saying I don't have permission to view them even though I do

Hi all. Well I have found somewhat of a solution to my problem.

It looks like this all happened when I used carbon copy cloaner to move my disk to a different disk. From that time my PDFs wouldn't open due to the above error in Preview (although they worked fine in Adobe Reader).

After this I decided to move my home folder to another disk, and this time instead of using carbon copy cloaner, I just copied the files using finder. This magically fixed all my PDFs so they'd open with preview.

Either way this is idiotic, but you may have some luck to try copying all your files off to an external drive and then copying them back to your original drive using finder.

I hope this works for some of you. Good luck!

I find it extremely irritating that, sometimes, when I try to open up jpg's with preview I get the permissions issue and many, or all, won't open. However, I have to be the IT person for my wife's PC, against both my will and my knowledge base. So, I have discovered that when this happens, I just do the MicroSoft thing and reboot, something I usually only do every few months or so. Usually when I do this, Preview will open the jpg's. If not, I reboot again. Seems Apple has learned something from MicroSoft. I wonder if rebooting to fix problems has been patented by MicroSoft?

Sort of solved, but not happily.

Steve

Found the same "fix". Each time I stop being able to access jpgs and pngs I just reboot. Super simple, no worries. 🙂

Oh, except for when Time Machine is 2 hours into a 5 hour backup. So only then is it a hassle.

Ok, maybe also the time I was rushing for a meeting and needed to view an image first. So I guess then too.

Or maybe also when Handbrake was 2 hours into remuxing a video file with only 30 minutes left.

Or when I was presenting in front of our entire company and needed to show an image.

Or when I was about to leave the office to see my kid's school play and needed to quickly figure out which image I was supposed to email my colleague before leaving.

Or basically any time I'm not able to get to my new Quad Core Gateway PC with a 4TB HDD and 12GB memory running the suprisingly stable Windows 7 environment that cost 1/4 of my MacBook Pro with triple the horsepower. That lame PC shockingly let's me open all my image files. Haven't rebooted in 4 weeks. Must be a fluke. Windows *****!

Yep. No issue here. Lion is just dandy. All's just hunky dory in my Apple-addled brain. Well, gotta go replace the battery in my wife's new Retina MacBook. Hey wait, what's all this glue....

This seems to have "fixed" it for me as well. Crazy annoying but much better than other suggestions I have seen.

It just happened again. As I was closing things up to reboot so preview would open some jpg's, I thought of something else to try. I just "quit" preview. Then it worked. Heck of a lot easier than rebooting. Hope it works for all of you as well. Steve

I can just say that I have the same problem and it also appened after a restoring made with Carbon Copy Cloner

Hello there, looks like the problem is that you dont have acrobat reader in your mac.. your are viewing the program in the viewer..

1- go to www.google.com

2- type DOWNLOAD ACROBAT READER FOR MAC

3- Click in the acrobat.com link

3- Install the latest version for mac

4- try to open your file

Try this to see what happen i think this will resolve the problem..

Cuidate mucho Amigo.. saludos desde Guatemala..

Yes and no. Acrobat Reader opens PDF bookmarks across files okay but Preview used to support this too. Many people prefer Preview and that is why so many people are asking about this and related bugs.

Wow this works!

Thanks!

I just copied everything on to my flashdrive and replaced the originals

Still not great though, Apple should fix this.

Why hasn't Apple responded to this? This is crazy to have this issue. I shoot 500 pics I need to sort and view on my 5000$ macbook retina and I can't even open any of them. I'm returing it.

I got the same problem for unknown reasons. I could not open pdf files and the error messages pointed to permission. I checked the permisions and tried the fix the permissions. At the end, I am so convinced that the problem was with preview. So I quit the Preview and restart the Preview and the problem was gone!

Nothing seems to work. Even if preview will work after being restarted what the heck good is that if you have several windows open. You have to do it all over. It's ********. Apple is rotting. I also con't believe the icon previews of jpgs have to reload everytime you scoll back up or down to an area in the folder you just were and the previews were loaded. My iMac G4 is more responsive. Also, why in **** hasn't apple figured out how to make it so you don't have to rearrange how a folder is view every sinle time you go to it. So mush stuff looked over or made worst. I'm using a 15inch retina display by the way. The program Xee is way better that preview which is ********.

This is not a fix.

Quitting Preview totally worked for me. Thanks!

So i JUST experienced this for the first time. and SUPER annoying. But I FOUND A FIX that worked for me. I never post on these things but i figured id help out anyone else who is like me and just want an easy fix without suggesting downloading things, or using other programs to fix an issue. I just want to use my computer the exact same way i was using it before "issue" happend. anyways, if you go to your disk utility, and click on ur drive, there is a "repair permissions" button that you can choose. after that i restarted my computer and everything back to normal. and if your also like me, you will have no idea what the instructions were that i gave and like to watch someone do it step-by-step. heres the youtube channel i found that helped me. i hope it helps all of you. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTtOr_2LYiU If the link doesnt work you the youtube video is titled "couldn't be opened because you don't have permission to view it YOSEMITE mac". I dont have yosemite cuz i hated it (way too boggy for me) and went back to mavericks, but it still worked for me.