How to open image added to Pages doc in Preview app?

Click on the image in Pages > Inspector > Metrics > File Info > drag image icon to desktop > double click and should open in Preview

If not, right click on the image in Finder and choose Open with > Preview

Peter

When you select an image with your right button, a contextual menu will appear that has an Open With ▸ item. This apparently now defaults to Pixelmator, but futher down this secondary menu of available applications should be the opportunity to choose Preview.

You could place your cursor over the image file and press the spacebar to launch QuickLook.

If you do not want Pixelmator as the default application when double-clicking an image, you can reset this to Preview. Follow these steps:

1. Right-button select any image. Choose Get Info from the contextual menu.
2. There is an Open with: section on the Get Info panel
   1. Selection probably shows Pixelmator
   2. Change selector to pick Preview

      If not on this selector menu, choose Other...

      1. /Applications folder will drop down. Choose Preview.
   3. Click Change All... button
   4. Pop-up dialog will ask if you are sure. Press continue.
3. Preview is now configured to open graphic files by default

   Unless they are Pixelmator specific files

Your automator workflow needs to be enabled in the Keyboard Panel (System Preferences) under Services.You need to select the image in Pages before that Pages > Services menu will show your workflow item. As to whether your workflow item actually works, that is an entirely different matter.

Some of this will be redundant for you. Just covering the bases again.

I have an automator service that I purposely wrote for Pages.

In Automator, Service receives no input in Pages. Input is entire selection and Output replaces selected text is unchecked. In your case, the Open Images in Preview action would receive selected image files in Pages.

In System Preferences, under Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts, I added my service as an Application Shortcut. It was configured for Pages only, and I assigned an unused keyboard shortcut. I made certain that my service was checked under Services. This service looks for a specific word sequence in a Pages document and if found, replaces that sequence with the document word count.

The description for the Open Images In Preview action specifies that it opens specified images in Preview. You would have to click to select an image in Pages before this service would cooperate.

I think the reason your Service works in the Finder, but not in Pages, is because the input has to be an image file. A selected image in Pages is a reference to an "image binary" within the Pages document, not a file, so the Service doesn't work in Pages.

They must have special coffee in Manheim because what you say makes sense.

I don't know how Pixelmator created their Service, but I suspect it involves programming that is beyond my abilities.

The following AppleScript will copy the selection in Pages and open a new preview window from the clipboard. It could be run as a Service with Automator. (It will also leave the image on the clipboard; if that is a problem, it could probably be modified, but I didn't get that sophisticated with it.)

tell application "System Events"

tell process "Pages"

set frontmost to true

clickmenu item "Copy" of menu 1 of menu bar item "Edit" of menu bar 1

end tell

tell process "Preview"

set frontmost to true

click menu item "New from Clipboard" of menu 1 of menu bar item "File" of menu bar 1

end tell

end tell

Pixelmator does not install any Automator services. It does have five Automator actions that reside within the Package contents, but these are unavailable by default to any system preferences setting. Nor are they discussed in the Pixelmator application help.

It is my belief that the application developer can choose to allow an application to advertise (or not) the services it can provide, and these hints are picked up by OS X as entries in the Keyboard shortcuts Services category. Thus, in the Services Picture category, there is an Open with Pixelmator checkbox, and not one for Preview, GIMP, or Graphic Converter.

Selecting the Open with Pixelmator category in services places it in the Pages application services menu, and if you were to select an image in Pages and then right-click, the Open with Pixelmator option would appear at the bottom of the contextual menu as well. With apologies to Jeff, Pixelmator will open a selected image within Pages. Tried it.

Admittedly, a weak explanation for your Open Images with Preview service not working is in part, how Apple didn't write Preview, as much as the fact it isn't inherently viewed by Pages as an image editor.

I am not sure why apologies would be necessary? I never suggested that Pixelmator couldn't open an image from Pages; I'm sure that it can and that it does it by providing a service that deals directly with the image.

What I said was that an Automator workflow that looks for an image file can't open an image selected in Pages, because it isn't treated as a file within pages. You can bring an image into Pages directly from the clipboard without ever saving it to a file on the hard drive, and Pages (or Pixelmator) can work with it as image data. The availlable Automator actions, however, are for opening files, not data.

I don't use Pixelmator (I tried it briefly, but didn't like the way it looked, and decided I didn't need an image editor that couldn't deal with any mode but RGB), so I can't experiment with it, but I wonder what happens if you open an image from a Pages document and edit it, then save it. Ideally, it would probably put the edited image back into the Pages document, replacing the original data, but that would be a much more sophisticated Service than anything availlable in Automator.