In addition to viewing and printing digital images and Portable Document Format (PDF) files, it can also edit these media types.

[3] In macOS Monterey and earlier, Preview supported the display of EPS and PostScript documents using on-the-fly conversion to PDF format.

[5] As of OS X 10.4 (Tiger), Preview lost playback functionality and animated GIF files are displayed as individual frames in a numbered sequence.

Preview can convert between image formats; it can export to BMP, JP2, JPEG, PDF, PICT, PNG, SGI, TGA, and TIFF.

Beginning with Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, Preview restricts the Format option popup menu in the Save As dialog to commonly used types.