preview says I don't have permission to open any of my files

For me, what I determined was the culprit is Preview app. Quiting Preview app and then trying to open the file works--every time!

I believe it is a bug in the Preview app tyhat somehow it gets hung up and will not allow you to open any filetype associated with the Preview app, which in my case is *.png, *.jpg, *.pdf.

This is likely a problem with the system's sandboxing routines for Preview. Relaunching the program and/or restarting the system should fix it, but if not then go to the Go menu in the Finder, hold the Option key, and choose "Library." Then go to the Containers folder and remove the folder called "com.apple.Preview" and then try relaunching the program to see if this helps.

Try quitting and re-opening - worked for me OS 10.12.1

Choose color-chooser.jpg and "Get Ingo" Give us a screenshot of the info screen.

I had the same problem in El Capitan 10.11.5. In my case it was a transient problem that went away without me having to fix anything.

Here's what I observed for future record: I was able to open some files with Preview but not others. I've noticed that when I looked at the files in terminal using "ls -l", those could be opened showed "-rwxrwxrwx@" and those that couldn't be opened showed "-rwxrwxrwx" (without the trailing "@"). The man page for ls says "

If the file or directory has extended attributes, the permissions field printed by the -l option is followed by a '@' character." which is not particularly helpful.

The files without @ could be opened with other apps (say, Chrome) but not with Preview. Simply restarting Preview didn't help but eventually the problem went away without restarting the system or using other workarounds from this thread. Once the problem went away, all files showed the "@" in the permission field when using "ls -l"

Oh, an in my case all files were in the same directory copied from the same memory card of a digital camera.

This worked for me as well. I simply quit out of Preview and was able to open the file directly with ""Use Preview" and it opened perfectly.

Thank you !

Bill

It worked for me. I had the same problem (file from iCloud, macOS Sierra), so I closed the opened files on Preview and quit the Preview app, and when I tried to open the file (pdf and jpg), it worked well. Thanks for this.

I am sick of not being able to open my Jpeg files in Preview. When I go to get info on the file I am trying to open, make it read write all, it still will not open. This doesn't happen all the times, but most of the times it does.

I have the same issue... I attempted a screenshot of the info screen and it also won't open because "i don't have permission to view it" so I can't attach the image of the screenshot... any thoughts?

This problem is still here for me on Mavericks: I can't preview my own screen shots!

All of the remedies mentioned and all those mentioned in other places failed.

I hate to say that I'm looking for an other application to view my picture files.

;JOOP!

Same thing is happening to me in El Capitan. Get Info has nothing but misinfo in it. It says file suffix is hidden; it's not. It says I have read/write permission; I don't (but only in Preview; the preview in Finder columns view works perfectly, and the files open okay in all other apps).

I'm running El Capitan and have been previewing 1000 images at a time and had this error every time I went to do the next batch, restarting finder didnt fix it, but restarting the whole computer fixed it each time, but very time consuming. Your suggestion worked. Could this be called a 'bug' to be reported or is it just that I am asking too much of preview to open 1000 images at a time? (I have to rotate and delete some BEFORE importing to photos)

I am a bit confused here, this bug has been going on for at least 5 years and through at least 6 different OS, and the only fix is to quit Preview and restart every time it happens? How does that make any sense? Why was this problem not fixed at the source? It is clearly a bug and it is clearly annoying. Mac people, please fix it.

Workaraounds are all well and good but a genuine FIX would be better. No offense to you intended, Topher: you didn't create the problem.

(Or did you?) 😀