Preview not opening PDFs in El Capitan

Hi there.

I am having the exact same problems on my iMac. Preview opens email attachments (usually pdfs) but

only shows blank pages. Preview won't open pdfs from any of my folders.

I have to choose "open with" Adobe Reader.

I have one system running Yosemite and two running El Capitan. PDF files created on Yosemite can be open and seen correctly. Moving the PDFs to El Capitan and opening them with Preview shows a blank page. Opening the same PDF files with the Adobe Reader works.

I have exactly the same problem.

Starting El Capitan in Safe Mode (hold SHIFT at the BEEP) and opening a PDF in Preview, then restarting the system worked for me.

Spoke to soon, reverted back to not opening. Tsk, tsk.

Yeah, I have a brand new mac that came with El Capitan pre-installed. PDF's will not open in Preview. Spinning ball of doom, and at best I see a blank box with nothing in it -- as if the doc is open but its see through and yo can see to the desktop image.

Just drop it on Chrome until they get this fixed.

I've had exactly this same issue too. Very unusual not to find a fix on the web...

I have the exact same problem. Preview just shows white pages and grey empty faded out thumbnails. I downloaded the free Adobe Reader for now. Hopefully there'll be a fix to this problem soon.

Same problem.

Preview won't open PDFs. I can do a quicklook at PDFs.

Restarting in safemode did not fix the problem. I could not open PDFs in safemode, or after restarting in normal mode.

Same problem! Exactly! So frustrating. 😟

Same problem. To temporarily resolve I close Preview completely and upon re-opening the pdf's are now viewable in Preview.

Hi Christopher Vigil1 -

By temporarily resolve do you mean that the problem returns? Are you taking any action that seems to create the problem again? The steps you are taking does not fix preview on my system (even temporarily).

I have tried everything listed except reinstalling OSX, and reinstalling just preview (after using a third party program to extract preview.app from the OSX installation package). I haven't taken either of those steps as it is unclear if that will fix it.

My preview app was working fine initially, on a new macbook that I had just upgraded from yosemite to el capitan. I can't be sure, but I think it was around the time I updated the "open PDFs with" preference that preview stopped working.

Still looking for a solution.

Same problem but it's more complicated than all PDFs. Some open fine--haven't determined a pattern yet i.e. whether old vs new PDFs, created by a particular app or something else. Also some JPGs do not open--haven't determined a pettern with those either. Haven't tried other image files yet.

Also it seems that opening a PDF in Acrobat that wouldn't initially open in Preview did open after that. Amazingly the 10 or so PDFs tried so far also opened in Preview. If lucky that was the fix but have tested too few and I can't make any sense of that as a fix.

Pixelmator, Gimp, Keynote, MS PPT for Mac, etc all seem to open the files Preview has trouble with but I've only tried a few. Will report if I do further testing.

Same problem here. Though I discovered it when I went to open a PDF and Affinity Photo started up. I had just purchased Affinity the other day and didn't realize it was associated with PDF file type. I tried an "Open with" using Preview, and changing all PDF file types to Preview, rebooting, uninstalling Affinity, rebooting, until finally finding this thread in searching on the web. No idea why Preview isn't working. I've been using El Cap for some time and haven't experienced the problem. Since reinstalling the OS and other fixes seem to be temporary for those who have tried it, I'll just another PDF application until it's fixed or I see a solution on this thread.