Add notes and text to pictures with Preview

December 17th, 2008  |  Published in Basics  |  8 Comments

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Don’t underestimate Preview, the image app that comes with every Mac. It will do a very good job of opening a wide variety of image formats for you, convert from one format to another and do good things with PDFs, too. But wait! There’s more!

You can write on photographs with it… in whatever font you like, and whatever size of text you need. Yes, you can change colours, move the text around and save the result as a JPEG, ready to email of post to the web.

The key is the “Annotate” button in the toolbar. Try it, for making notes on photos or adding greetings and captions to create personalized cards you can send to friends.

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  1. Dave says:

    May 12th, 2009 at 7:35 pm (#)

    Please help.

    I wish to add text, and some kind of border to photos before I add them to my website.

    How can I do this? iPhoto seems not to have such a function, and in Preview the annotate options are grayed out.

    Do I need Aperture?

    Many thanks.

  2. admin says:

    May 12th, 2009 at 9:06 pm (#)

    I’ll put up a quick set on instructions for how to add a border and text to a photo using only your Preview app, Dave. Take a look shortly.

  3. Joanne says:

    October 17th, 2009 at 7:05 pm (#)

    Same with Dave, I tried adding notes to a picture through Preview but “annotate” won’t allow me to add any text – everything’s just grayed out.

    Help please….

    Thanks!

  4. Venkat Ummadishetty says:

    November 2nd, 2009 at 4:14 am (#)

    Hi Joanne,

    I have used annotate tool in Preview on Leopard. But I was not able to find how to add text to it. I think that should be possible with some third party tools.

    To Annotate the non-PDF files:
    Open your picture in Preview, then select View » Customize Toolbar. Drag the Annotate tool to your toolbar. Click on the Annotate icon & hold on for a while to see all types of annotations.Then just choose the type of annotation you want to make from the newly-created toolbar element, and use the mouse to add it to your picture. You can also use following modifiers:

    * Press the ‘+’ or ‘-’ keys to increase or decrease line thickness.
    * Choose Tools » Show Colors and use the color wheel to change the color of the selected object (including notes).
    * Choose Tools » Show Fonts and use the fonts panel to change the text note font.

    This functionality could be useful when commenting screenshots.

    I will give you more details about adding text, once I know about it.

    Regards
    Venkat

  5. heart J says:

    January 21st, 2010 at 4:33 pm (#)

    Hi Venkat,

    Thank you very much for the info. i tried preview, and it worked perfectly. God bless you!

    Regards,
    Heart J

  6. Saba Ammari says:

    February 13th, 2010 at 2:29 am (#)

    Is there any way to rotate the text?

  7. admin says:

    February 13th, 2010 at 12:08 pm (#)

    No way I’ve been able to find, Saba.

  8. Me says:

    June 6th, 2010 at 1:36 pm (#)

    I’m about to pull my hair out over this! I have no ‘annotate’ button anywhere in my Customize Toolbar window. Why? Makes no sense – anyone know how I can get one? Please let me know!

    customernumberone@gmail.com

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