Here’s a short, sweet, and potentially very useful hint for your Thursday. You may think of Preview as mainly an image viewer, and not an image creator. BUt that’s not necessarily true; Preview can actually create images, at least in one very specific situation: when you have a graphic image on the clipboard. When there’s a graphic on your clipboard, you can use Preview to quickly convert the clipboard contents into an image file.
How? It’s as easy as opening Preview and pressing Command-N.
Preview will automatically insert the contents of the clipboard, and you can then use File -> Save to save the image in a format and location of your choosing. This isn’t really hidden behavior; the File menu lists New From Clipboard instead of the usual New as the action associated with Command-N.
But I’m so ingrained into thinking “Command-N means new empty object” that I hadn’t thought to try it in Preview, which I’d always considered “just” an image viewer.
Author: Rob Griffiths
Former Macworld Senior Editor Rob Griffiths founded Mac OS X Hints. He's now master of ceremonies at Many Tricks Software.