This is one of those tricks that you rarely need, but when you do need it, it really saves tearing your hair out!

You probably know that Preview lets you view multiple images in a single Preview window, with each image thumbnailed in the drawer. (To do this, simply multi-select all your images in a Finder window, and hit Command-O to open them.) Preview helpfully sorts the images in the drawer alphanumerically by filename (by default). This is a really handy feature, as it means that you can open, say, 100 images without causing 100 Preview windows to appear!

This is all very well, but occasionally Preview displays the images in the wrong order in the drawer. (This happens in Mac OS 10.4.9 – the latest at the time of writing – and I’m pretty sure it affects earlier versions too.) It seems to happen pretty much at random, but I’d hazard a guess that it’s something to do with the way Finder passes the filenames to Preview. You can see the problem in the screenshot below – the third image should be fg0104, not fg0807b:

This is frustrating if you’re viewing a lot of images, and you need to view them in the correct order. For example, in the above screenshot I’m previewing hundreds of figures for a Photoshop book I’m writing, so I need to make sure they’re all there in the right sequence.

Here’s how to persuade Preview to sort them correctly. Right-click any thumbnail and you’ll see a drop-down menu appear, listing the available sorting options for the drawer, as well as showing you the current sort order:

As you can see, it’s currently set to “name”, yet it’s not sorting properly by name. The solution is simply to click “name” again; this seems to jog Preview’s memory, and it re-sorts the drawer correctly, by filename, in alphanumeric order:

A handy little trick when you need it!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 9th, 2007 at 7:38 pm and is filed under Mac tips & tricks, Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.