How do I fix Preview?

Have you tried repairing disk permissions?

Two things to try:

First, launch Preview from the dock while holding the shift key down. Still crashes?

If so, in the Finder Go menu, hold option down and open the Library.

Go to the Preference folder. Move all files starting with "com.apple.Preview" into the trash.

Restart Preview.

Does that help?

charlie

Log in with a different account (create a temporary one if necessary) and launch Preview from within that account. Does the problem still occur? This will determine if it's a problem local to your account or if it's a system-wide issue, and will help us narrow down the possible causes.

Zyriab's advice (not the permissions thing, which rarely does any good) - the try it with a different user thing is the next step. You can use the Guest account. Another standard troubleshooting step is to start up in Safe Mode, Mac OS X: Starting up in Safe Mode . This is a bit long in starting up so you have to be patient.

charlie

If you started in Safe Mode and logged in with your normal account then it seems the problem is just with your account, not with Preview generally as it started fine in the Guest account. So re-installing Preview won't do any good. The problem is probably a config file in your home directory. I've not had to troubleshoot Preview before so I'm not sure what config files it uses or where they are. I'll do some investigating and get back to you.

Go into Activity Monitor and check that no processes possibly associated with Preview are running. If so, then stop them. Move ~/Library/Saved Application State/com.apple.Preview.savedState to the trash. DO NOT empty the trash. Start Preview. If it still doesn't work restore what you moved to Trash.

Hmm, it's slightly worrying. I'm not sure if it's bad. The reason I emphasised that you don't empty the trash is that I'm stabbing in the dark a bit here! What I would do at this stage is look through ~/Library and find anything you might think is a Preview support file/config file and move it to the trash, then restart Preview - but don't empty the trash coz you may need to restore it afterwards. Some of these things Preview will recreate when it starts again, that's desirable coz whatever is causing the problem we want it to recreated from new. Likely candidates to look through in ~/Library would be Application Support, Caches, Preferences, etc... But have a good trawl through and see what you kind find. Like I said, it's stabbing in the dark a bit, but what else have we got at this point?!

Just to be ABSOLUTELY CLEAR, ~/Library is the library folder in your home folder, not in the root of the drive - that's /Library! We only want to look in the ~/Library (i.e. the one in your home folder) coz the problem is only with *your* account.

Launch the Console application by entering the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search, and look under "User Diagnostic Reports" for crash logs related to the application(s). Select the most recent one and post the contents -- the text, please, not a screenshot. For privacy’s sake, I suggest you edit out the “Anonymous UUID,” a long string of letters, numbers, and dashes in the header of the report.