Choose System Preference and click on Software Update. To do so, click on the Apple menu and choose About this Mac. This is because Apple frequently patches its updates to fix software bugs. What you can do to fix macOS bugs is to update your Mac to the latest available software. If the version of macOS running on your Mac has a bug, the Preview app may not work normally.

If restarting is unresponding, force shut down your Mac and reboot your Mac computer manually. To restart your MacBook, simply click the Apple menu and select Restart. A quick macOS restart should fix this problem and meanwhile clear out RAM or temporary files to boost your Mac performance. Sometimes, the macOS misbehaving may cause Preview not to work on your MacBook Air or MacBook Pro. If closing Preview and reopening it didn't work, try to restart your Mac instead.

Launch Preview again and check whether it works as it normally does.

Click on the X button at the top left corner of the window, and choose Force Quit.

Input 'Preview' in the search column and select it from the list.

Launch Finder, open Applications > Utilities > Activity Monitor.

In this situation, try to force quit it on Mac with the below steps: However, this may not work when the Preview app freezes and becomes completely unresponsive. The simplest way to close the Preview app is to click Preview from the apple menu bar and then select Quit Preview from the drop-down list. When Preview is not working normally, try to close the app and start it up again. If not, go ahead to try the below methods to fix the macOS Preview not working problem. If Preview opens this new file without any problems, then you know there's an issue with the file itself. The simplest way to test this is to try opening a different file in Preview. If the file you're trying to open in Preview gets corrupted, the Preview won't open it as usual. Whether Preview is refusing to open an image file or is unable to edit the image, the first thing you should check is the image itself.

You can start with the first one, see if your problem has been fixed, and then continue to the next one if your problem is not resolved. We list 8 fixes to resolve the problem of macOS Preview not working. Preview not working on Mac, how to fix it No matter which case you're facing now, you can troubleshoot the problems with the below methods. You're unable to use some of the tools.

Latest version of preview mac os