Perhaps you have tried to submit applications for certain jobs and had to convert files from one format to another before uploading, or maybe you just needed to share the file with a friend.
There are different ways to get files in the format you desire; both online and offline methods. The online methods however require you to consume data. But why “be a navy when you can be a pirate?”. Why go online when you can easily use an inbuilt application on your Mac machine. The Preview application is great for the job!
With the Preview app you are not limited to viewing images, you can do much more, like converting and exporting virtually any image from one format to the other. Whether it is in PNG, JPEG, PDF, HEIC, or in TIFF format, you can change that. By the way, HEIC is Apple’s new format, and the Preview app does support it.
Converting files cannot be any easier. In this post, we would take you on a journey or a preview into the Preview app (pun intended).
To start with, let us say we want to change the format of this image from PNG to JPEG:
We follow the steps below to achieve that goal.
Step 1: Find the image file using the Finder app. Select the image or images and double -click to open it in the Preview app.
Step 2: In case Preview is not set as your default image viewer, you can alternatively right-click on the selected image(s), scroll down to “Open With”, and choose Preview.
Step 3: When the image(s) is/are opened in the app, navigate to the top menu bar and select “File”, and go on to click on “Export”. You can even see the option to “Export as PDF” already, if you want your file in PDF format.
And if you are doing this for multiple images, you would have to do a “Command + A” to select every open image in a single Preview window.
Step 4: A prompt would appear where you can choose the folder you wish to export the converted image(s) to. You also have the chance of modifying the name of the image file to whatever you want. I will change the name to test_image in this case, and save the file in “Downloads”.
Step 5: After choosing the folder, you can scroll down to the field labeled “Format”. Click on it, and from the drop-down, select the format you wish your image file to be in. In our case the image was in PNG format and we want it to be in JPEG.
Step 6: Upon choosing the format you prefer, you may want to adjust some other features of the image, like image quality and so on. Under the “Format” field, you can find those options whether it is a HEIC or JGEP image. For PDF and TIFF, you would need to include password and make a choice between the different compression options respectively.
Step 7: Once you are done with choosing the name, adjusting the image features and choosing the desired format, the very important step is to click on “Save”. This way you ensure that all the efforts you have put in modifying the image format does not go to nough; need I really say that? The final image would have been stored in the destination folder you chose.
Step 8 (Optional): You may delete the original picture you started with. This is of course if you wish to.
So there you go, convert files into the formats you want in the 7 easy steps described above.
