John Lenaghan

Apple Preview – The Built-In App That Replaces Paid Tools on the Mac

Preview has a lot of features you used to have to pay for. Learn how to replace paid PDF and image editors with this tool that’s included for free on all Macs, iPhones, and iPads.
If you’ve ever paid for a PDF editor or image app for your Mac, there’s a good chance you spent money you didn’t need to.

Apple’s Preview app does a lot more than most people realize, and it’s already sitting on every Mac. Most of us only use it to open PDFs or take a quick look at a photo, then close it again without a second thought.

But it can do all kinds of other things:
- Sign documents
- Fill out forms
- Redact sensitive information
- Combine PDFs
- Remove backgrounds from images
…and a bunch of other things you used to need a paid app for.

The Markup Toolbar Is Where Everything Lives

Most of Preview’s useful tools are tucked behind one button on the toolbar – the one that looks like a marker. Click it and a second row of tools appears underneath.

If you’re not sure what a particular tool does, just hover your mouse pointer over it and Preview will tell you.

Securely Redact Sensitive Information

The redact tool lets you black out anything in a document – a bank account number, an address, anything you don’t want anyone reading the document to see. The important part is that Preview doesn’t just draw a black box on top of the text. It actually removes what’s underneath.

With some tools, the redaction mark is just a graphic sitting over the text, and anyone who knows what they’re doing can pull it off and read what was hidden. With Preview, once you save the redacted document, that information is gone for good.

To use it, select the redact tool, then drag a box around whatever you want to hide. If you hover over the black box, it’ll still show you what’s underneath – but only until you save. Once you save the file, Preview removes the original text permanently.

Fill Out Forms Without Typing Everything

When you’re filling in a PDF form, Preview can pull your details straight from your contacts.

Assuming you’ve filled out the details in your contact card, of course.

Click into a form field and you’ll get a popup with your own contact card as the default. Click it and Preview drops in your information – name, address, and so on. If you need to fill the form in for someone else in your contacts, select Choose Other and pick them from the list.

It’s not always perfect. Sometimes it gets mixed up about what a form field is asking for so you should always double check that everything landed in the right place. But it saves a lot of typing when you’ve got a long form to get through.

Sign Documents Three Different Ways

The signature tool is probably the one I use the most. There are three ways to create a signature and once you’ve made one, Preview saves it so it’s always there when you need it.

1. Using a trackpad. If you’re on a MacBook or have a separate trackpad, you can sign with your finger. Click to start, then draw your signature on the trackpad – it shows up on screen as you go. While you’re doing this, the trackpad stops acting as your mouse, so when you’re done you just press any key on the keyboard to save it.

2. Using the camera. Sign a white sheet of paper, hold it up to your Mac’s camera, and Preview will scan the signature off the page.

3. Using your iPhone or iPad. You can also sign on your phone or tablet with your finger, or in the case of an iPad, with an Apple Pencil if you’ve got one.

Once a signature is saved, you just click it to drop it into a document, then drag it into position and resize it to fit the signature box.

If you want to delete a saved signature, hover over it in the dropdown and click the X. There’s no confirmation and no warning, so just be careful you don’t remove one by accident.

Combine, Rearrange, and Delete PDF Pages

Open the sidebar in thumbnail mode and you’ve got a surprising amount of control over the document.

You can drag pages into a different order to rearrange them or you can drag pages between two open documents to combine them. If you’ve got two or three separate PDFs you want to merge into one, open them side by side, set the sidebars to thumbnails, and drag pages from one into the other.

Deleting pages is just as easy – click the thumbnail in the sidebar and either use Edit → Delete or press the delete key.

Lock Down a PDF With Permissions

Every so often you’ll open a form that won’t let you sign it electronically. That’s not a Preview limitation – it’s a permission the document’s creator set.

And you can set the same kind of permissions on your own PDFs.

Click the ‘i’ icon in the toolbar to open the inspector, and the lock icon at the top shows you which permissions are set. To change them, go to File > Export, then click the Permissions button before you save.

You’ve got two password options. The top one asks for a password before anyone can even open the file. The second – the owner password – controls what people can do once it’s open, like whether they’re allowed to print it or add annotations and signatures.

Check the permissions you want to allow and leave the ones you don’t unchecked.

For example, if you wanted to stop someone from printing a document or signing it, you’d check everything else, set an owner password, and export. Anyone who opens it afterward will find those options locked and not available.

If you need to update a locked document, you can unlock it again by entering the password.

Shrink a File That’s Too Big to Upload

Ever tried to upload a PDF somewhere and been told it’s over the size limit? Preview can help with that too.

Go to File → Export and open the Quartz Filter dropdown, then choose Reduce File Size. There’s no preview of how much you’ll save – you just have to save it and check – but it compresses whatever it can without losing the information in the document.

In one of my own tests, the same document went from 6.1 MB down to 5.3 MB. Not a huge difference, but often it’s enough to get you under a file size limit.

Fill In a Form and Reply Straight From Email

If someone emails you a PDF form, you can open it right from Apple Mail, fill it in with Preview, and reply with the completed form attached – without ever saving the file to your desktop.

When you go to save, Preview asks what you want to do: reply to the original email with the form attached, start a new email, or just save the file. Choose reply and it builds the email for you, with the filled-in form already attached.

It Does Images, Too

Most people end up using Preview for opening PDFs but it can do a fair bit with images as well. It’s not going to replace apps like Photoshop or Pixelmator, but for the everyday stuff, it’s more than capable.

Remove a Background in One Click

Preview has a background removal tool built right in – it’s the icon beside the rotate button.

Click it and Preview strips the background out from behind your subject. It won’t be as clean as a dedicated app, and if you zoom in you’ll see it loses some fine detail around the edges. But for something like a profile picture, where the image gets shrunk down anyway, it’s more than good enough.

The tool is greyed out on some photos where it can’t recognize what’s in the foreground and what’s in the background. If you don’t see it active, the image just isn’t one it can work with.

Strip Location Data Before You Share a Photo

This one is more of a privacy tip than an editing trick, but it’s worth knowing.

Most photos from your iPhone (or a digital camera) carry a lot of hidden information – lens details, resolution, and often the exact location where the shot was taken. Click the ‘i’ icon on the toolbar to open the inspector, then look under the info tab for the GPS section and Preview will show you where the photo was taken on a map.

If you’re sending a photo to someone and you’d rather not hand over that information, there’s a button to remove it. Save the edited image and that information is gone.

The App You Already Paid For

Preview rarely gets the attention some of Apple’s other apps do. But it’s a genuinely capable tool, it’s built into every Mac, iPhone, and iPad, and it might save you a few bucks on paid apps.

Apple has a good online manual for it if you want to dig deeper.

If you’d rather see all of this in action, I walk through it step-by-step in this video:
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How to Build a Simple Project System in Apple Notes

Learn how to set up Apple Notes so you can find all the details about your projects quickly and easily.
Have you ever started a project with the best intentions of keeping your notes, tasks, and other resources organized, but ended up with things scattered all over your system a few days later?

It’s a struggle to find anything when you need it and you end up wasting time looking for things instead of working on what you need to get done.

I hate to admit how often this happens to me if I don’t spend a few minutes setting up an organization system before I start.

And a few minutes is all it takes…

The “Findability” Problem

When you first set up your notes system, task manager, and other tools, it’s easy to find everything. If you create a new note or want to pull up your list of tasks for the day, it probably only takes a few seconds.

But once you have a few projects on the go as well as all the other odds and ends you add to your system, it gets messy fast.

You end up with random notes floating around and you spend more and more time tracking down the information you need. That’s time you’re not spending working on the project itself.

There are lots of ways to organize projects but I like Apple Notes for a couple of reasons.
1. It’s available on all of Apple’s platforms and the syncing is quick and reliable for the most part
2. Apple Notes has become pretty powerful over the last few years
Step 1: Create a Project Folder

The first step is to create a folder for the new project. This is where all the notes related to the project get saved as you capture things.

Where you put the project folder depends on how you have your notes set up. There are various approaches:
- PARA — Projects, Areas, Resources, and Archives as the four top-level folders. If you use a system like that, you’d drop the project into the Projects folder.
- PPV – Pillars, Pipelines, and Vaults as the top-level folders. In this case, projects go in the Pipelines top level folder.
- By area of life — In my case, I prefer to organize by the area of my life things relate to: personal, business, health, learning, and so on.
There’s no right or wrong way to do this — it’s whatever you’re most comfortable with and whatever clicks with the way you think. The trick is to set it up so everything is in the place you would expect, even if you come back to it months or years from now.

Step 2: Create the Hub Note

Once you’ve created the folder, you start creating notes inside it. The first note you create is the hub note. I’ll use a hypothetical trip to Thailand as an example.

Next, pin that note to the top so it’s always the first thing you see in the folder. To pin a note, just right-click and choose Pin Note.

It stays at the top no matter what else you create or edit, so it’s always quick to get into the hub note that links out to everything else.

Add Your Metadata at the Top

At the top of the hub note, I put some metadata for the project.

In this case it’s a trip, so I’ve got the hypothetical dates. But this could be a due date for the project, or if it were an article I was working on, it might be the publish date.

I like to have it all in the grey box like the screenshot above to help separate it from the rest of the note. To format it that way in Apple Notes, choose the Monostyled text format.

I might want to link to this note from other places, so I add a link to the note itself in this section. The iCloud link is the sharing link for the note. Having it here means it’s handy to copy anywhere else I might want to use it.

Step 3: Link Out to Other Resources

Below the metadata I list links to the project’s resources. For example, a Reminders list – clicking it takes me straight to the list related to this trip. At the top of that Reminders list, I also include a link back to the hub note — a quick way to move back and forth between the pieces of the project.

I also link to other notes in the project so they’re all easily accessible. In this example, I’ve only got four notes, so it isn’t strictly necessary. But on a bigger project with a long list of notes, having links to the important ones here is easier than having to scroll through the list to find what you’re looking for.

Separate Notes for Reusable Pieces

Anything related to the project can go into the hub note. In this example, that could be flight information, Airbnb or hotel info, and so on. But I break some things out into separate notes, mainly because I might want to reuse them later.

For example, I’ve got a few separate notes for this Thailand trip:
- Thailand visitor information – this note has details like travel advisories and Thai visa info. If I take another trip to Thailand down the road, this info will be useful again. Instead of burying it in a note tied to this one trip, I keep it separate so I can link to it from whatever new hub note I create.
- Packing list — the packing list is more or less the same for every trip, so keeping it separate makes it easy to reuse or duplicate for another trip rather than sticking it inside one project’s note.
Checklists vs To-Do Items

I have a Reminders list link in the hub note for all the actionable to-do items. But I also keep checklist notes separately, because I treat checklists differently from to-dos.
- Checklists are reminders to make sure I don’t forget a step — not really things I have to do. I don’t want them cluttering my list of tasks for the day, but I still want to check them off as I go.
- To-do items in Reminders are actionable tasks – things I have to pick up, things I need to do by a certain date, etc. This is the stuff I actually want to see in Reminders at the start of the day.
Integration with Other Apple Apps

One reason I use Apple Notes for this is how well it integrates with other Apple apps. If I get an email with flight itinerary details, I can send it into Notes and have the details right there. If I’m looking at a page in Safari I want to save, I can share it into Notes just as easily. It makes it easy to pull information from other places on my Mac, iPhone, or iPad into these notes and keep a running tab as the project goes on.

Over time the hub note gradually grows as I work through it. As I add things, anything I think I might want to reuse gets saved into the project folder as a separate note so I can link to it from other places later.

A Few Minutes Now Will Save You a Lot More Later

When you start a new project, everything is fresh in your mind, and it’s easy to assume that’ll always be the case. But in my experience it doesn’t take long for things to get disorganized and you forget where things are.

Taking a few minutes to set up the scaffolding before diving in saves a lot of time and headaches as the work progresses.

If you want to see how to set this up for yourself, I walk through the process step-by-step in this video:
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How to Capture Ideas in Apple Notes

How to customize the shortcuts in my recent Notes Quick Capture video.
This post has some details about how to customize the Quick Capture shortcuts I went through in my recent video about capturing notes on various Apple devices.

If you found this without having seen the video, this is the one:

Shortcut Links
- Action Button Quick Capture Menu
- Lock Screen Quick Capture Widget
Note: I didn’t mention it in the video but the Action Button shortcut can be run from anywhere. It doesn’t have to be connected to the action button on newer iPhones. You could add the shortcut to your home screen, use a Shortcuts widget, or any other option for running a shortcut. It also works on macOS and iPadOS, not just iOS.

Customizing the Quick Capture Menu

There are several options you can customize with the action button menu shortcut.

Date & Time Formats

I’m using YYYY-MM-DD for the name on my daily notes. I prefer that format because it sorts into a more logical order (grouped by years and months) as more notes get added.

If you prefer a different naming scheme, you can adjust it in the first “Format Date” action in the shortcut:

You can adjust it in the Format String field. In this example, it’s set to yyyy-MM-dd which translates to a date like 2026-02-09. There are lots of different options to format the date though.

You’ll find details in the Shortcuts manual and a more complete list on the Unicode #35 standard page.

Make sure you use a format that will create a unique note every day. For example, if you only used MM-dd you would start getting duplicate titles after the first year of daily notes. If you have more than one note with the same name, the daily log action could have problems and log to the wrong note.

The second and third Format Date actions can also be changed if you prefer something different. They’re using format strings based on the information at those links.

EEEE = full name of day (eg. Monday)
HH:mm:ss = 24 hour time reference (eg. 15:33:12)

If you don’t see the Format String details after installing the shortcut, click the disclosure arrow to the right of the “Format Date” heading to expand that action.

Note Links

The name of the note used in the Daily Log section of the shortcut is based on the date format you’re using for the name of your daily notes. If you change the date format, it will automatically look for a matching note.

You’ll need to make sure the daily notes folder is set up to match your folder structure though. It’s set in the “Create Note” action:

Click the “Daily Notes” link after Create note with Rich Text from Markdown to choose the correct folder for your notes.

The other two examples (Topic Ideas and Apartment Ideas) point to specific notes in my Notes app. You can change those to link to whatever note you want to use by clicking on the name of the note in the Create note with Rich Text from Markdown action.
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February 10, 2026
How to Build a Productivity System That Works for You

Learn how to stop searching for the perfect system and create one that’s custom-designed for you.
Over the last decade (or more) I’ve spent more time trying to perfect my productivity system than actually getting things done with it.

If you find yourself constantly tweaking your system or worse, rebuilding it from the ground up whenever you find a new method, you probably know how I felt. Building a new folder structure for your notes or restructuring and re-tagging all your tasks feels like you’re accomplishing something.

It can even be kind of fun.

But it’s not productive.

Let’s look at how I went from working on my system to working on the things in it.

My Productivity Journey

I’ve use some sort of system to track my time and to do lists as far back as I can remember. I’m pretty sure I started with a system called Day-Timer when I got my first real job after high school.

Day Timer Planner Layout

Funny enough, it doesn’t look like they’ve really changed the layout in the nearly 40 years since I started using them. That screenshot really brings back some memories.

I read the book Getting Things Done sometime around 2003 and proceeded to set up a folder system for tracking things. And I mean physical file folders, in a tall metal filing cabinet that weighed a ton, even when it was empty.

It wasn’t long before everything went digital so I went down a bunch of rabbit holes there…
- A set of scripts called Kinkless GTD that ran on top of OmniOutliner
- OmniFocus (which evolved from Kinkless GTD)
- Things
- Todoist
- Reminders, and various other apps over the years
And I’ve used PARA, PPV, Johnny Decimal, and various other folder structures for my notes and files.

Whenever I read about a new setup or watched a YouTube video about the latest system, I would spent hours restructuring everything. I was always sure this new system would be the one that would help me become a productivity wizard.

But none of them ever did.

I spent a lot of time feeling like I was the problem. The systems obviously worked for a lot of other people so I must be doing something wrong.

But a couple of years ago, I realized that the problem wasn’t me. It was that I was trying to work within the confines of systems that were designed by other people. And some things about them just didn’t click for me.

How I Stopped Tweaking and Starting Working

My lightbulb moment was when I was using the PARA system to organize my notes and other files. It was really close to the ideal system for me but there were a few things that still didn’t flow.

This time, instead of trying yet another system in the hope it would be perfect, I started making small changes to the PARA folder structure to suit the way my brain works. Whenever I felt some friction about where I should save a note or where to look for something I needed, I stopped to think about where I thought it should fit.

Then I moved it or created that folder in the system.

Gradually, everything ended up in the first place I thought of when I was working on something new. It took a few months to get everything sorted into a system that felt like it worked for me but I gradually started getting more done because I wasn’t constantly fighting against my system.

If you’re in the same boat I was, constantly trying new systems, switching apps, and looking for the “perfect” setup, you probably already know that’s not working for you. Instead of trying to fit your thinking into someone else’s design, the solution is to create your own.

A system that is set up to work the way YOU think.

There are two ways you can do this.

1. Start from Scratch

The first option is to start from scratch. Create folders that make sense to you whenever you’re saving a new note or file and there isn’t already a folder for it.

The same goes for project groups and tags when you’re adding something to your task manager.

As you add more things to your system, you can refine how those folders are laid out. Figure out how different folders are related and put them inside parent folders with a wider scope. Same for projects in your task manager.

Streamlining your folder structure

It’ll take some time but gradually, you’ll end up with a setup that’s designed specifically for you. And that’ll make a lot more sense whenever you’re working on something.

2. Modify Someone Else’s System to Suit You

The second option is to start with someone else’s system and gradually make changes to suit you. Whenever you find a friction point, figure out why it’s causing friction and what feels more in sync for you.

Let’s look at the PARA example I mentioned above. PARA is a folder system for organizing your files, notes, or anything else.

P = Projects (projects you’re actively working on)
A = Areas (various silos of your life such as Personal, Work, Family, etc.)
R = Resources (reference material or anything you might want to refer back to)
A = Archives (anything that’s completed but you want to hang onto)

Where this system broke down for me was the Projects and Areas sections. Having all my active projects mixed together in one folder didn’t feel right. I think in terms of the different areas of my life first, and then organize things within those silos.

So instead of having Projects and Areas as the top-level folders, I moved the areas to the top level and put everything else inside the appropriate folder.

The Personal, Work, Family, and other “area” folders are at the top of my folder layout and the projects, notes, and other things are all filed inside the appropriate area.

Changes I made to the PARA layout

If you’re not sure where to start, customizing an existing system is the better option of the two. Just keep in mind that no one system is right for everyone so when you find those points of friction, it doesn’t mean you’re doing something wrong.

And it doesn’t mean the system doesn’t work either. If you see other people who swear by it, that’s great. It obviously works for them. That doesn’t mean it’s exactly what you need.

Just like PARA wasn’t quite right for me.

Create Your Own “Perfect” System

If you’re still searching for the “perfect” system, think about what you like and don’t like about whatever you’re doing now. Instead of reorganizing everything in your system based on another YouTube video, start chipping away at the stuff you don’t like to make it more like the stuff you do.

You might be surprised by how much you get done when you’re actually working on the stuff in your system instead of the system itself.

If you want to see a walkthrough of how this works, I go through the details in this video:
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How to Change the Text Size in Apple Reminders for Mac

A quick guide to adjusting the “Preferred Reading Size” for Apple’s built-in apps without changing your screen resolution.

The default text size in the Mac version of Reminders can be a little small. There’s no option in the app itself to adjust the size but that doesn’t mean you can’t do it.

It’s kind of hidden so unless you know where to look, you may never see it.

Apple’s Hidden Settings

On most of Apple’s platforms (macOS, iOS, iPadOS, etc.) there’s a treasure trove of options hiding in the Accessibility settings.

As the name suggests, these settings are intended for people with accessibility needs. But a lot of the settings can help you personalize the way your device works, whether it’s an accessibility need or simply a preference.

One of the options on the Mac is to adjust the text size in a bunch of the built-in apps from Apple.

First, open System Settings on your Mac. Click the Apple logo in the top left corner of your display and then System Settings.

Click on Accessibility in the list of options in the left navigation menu and then Display in the options on the right. On the Display settings page, click on Text Size.

You’ll get a list of the apps that support independent text sizes. The list doesn’t include all of Apple’s built-in apps but a lot of them are here.

You can adjust the default text size for all the apps in the list using the slider at the top. Or you can leave it at the default setting and adjust the apps individually.

To change the text size in Reminders, click the dropdown beside Reminders, where it says “Use Preferred Reading Size”. You’ll get a list of all the different font sizes available.

Choose the size you like and click Done. It’s easiest if you have Reminders open beside the System Settings app so you can see how the different sizes look as you change them.

Once you click Done, the change is saved so Reminders will always use that size. You don’t need to change the setting again unless you want to adjust the size further.

If you ever want to go back to the original size, change the setting back to “Use Preferred Reading Size” and it’ll set it back to whatever the slider at the top of the settings page is set to.

If you prefer to see a step-by-step walkthrough of this process, I show how to do it in this video…

Last updated:

January 11, 2026