El Capitan Preview permission issues" couldn’t be opened because you don’t have permission to view it."

Try to quit and open again Preview. It works for me.

Explanation:

Today I had the same problem and the same error message. Opening the file (PDF) with another viewer (Skim) gave me no problem (hence it was a Preview problem) and I had many PDF files already open in Preview. I guessed it was a memory problem within Preview and I just quit Preview and reopen it (all the files were at that point opened again, but there was a memory clean in meantime). This simple action fixed the issue and I opened the files with no further error message.

I wish i could roll back but unfortunately i don't have permission to any of my external drives that have my time machine backups. What is the best method to get access back to the whole drive?

so simple and easy thank you. you rock. I'm just trying to read the walking dead and my power just went out. God send you are sir/ma'am

I support several users in a government agency, and they are required to use El Capitan for security, so I cannot roll anyone back to Yosemite.Only one user reports this issue, and I've been troubleshooting with her for several weeks now.

I've tried the PRAM reset, and the method suggested on this thread by the very helpful and legendary Linc Davis. But the fix only lasts until a third-party app is launched (Outlook 2011 or InDesign CC 2015 both do it), then Preview won't open PNG screen shots from the Desktop or Documents folders again because it does not have permission to view the file, even though the files will open in other apps (Photoshop CC 2015, Safari, Firefox, Photos, Google Chrome) without errors.

Does anyone have any idea how to fix this issue? The computer is a late 2013 iMac 27-inch with an i7 processor and 16 GB of RAM running OS X El Capitan 10.11.5. Any help would be most appreciated. I feel like Apple made a big mistake by not allowing us to verify and repair permissions in El Capitan.

Today, I had this same issue, and it is with sincere thanks to your expertise that I was able to continue my task. I had the permission problems, searched, did as you detailed, and as at this point in time, everything is fine. Thank you.

"Hold down the option key and select Go ▹ Library from the Finder menu bar. From the Library folder, delete the following items, if they exist:

Containers/com.apple.Preview "

I'm a firm believer in "the simplest solution is the best" -- having experienced this problem myself this morning, I fixed it with your complete solution (deleting all six objects) without logging out and back in. It worked, I could open my JPEGs. After two more group opens, it failed again, and this time, I just deleted the above object, and it worked. So maybe deleting all the other stuff and logging out and back in is unnecessary.