How to use page thumbnails in a PDF on Mac
A long document is much easier to navigate by sight than by page number. Thumbnails are how you do that.
Page numbers tell you where you are. Thumbnails tell you what is there. In a hundred-page document the difference is the difference between scrolling and arriving.
The sidebar and everything in it is free and always will be. There is nothing to sign up for and nothing is watermarked.
Showing them
The sidebar sits down the left of the window; ⌘+1 shows and hides it. Across the top of the sidebar are five panes — thumbnails, the outline, bookmarks, annotations and search — and the first is the one that opens by default.
What thumbnails are good for
| Situation | What you look for |
|---|---|
| Finding the figure you half remember | A page with a large block of image rather than text stands out immediately. |
| Finding where a section starts | A page with a lot of white at the top is usually a chapter opening. |
| Spotting a page that came in sideways | A landscape page in a portrait document is obvious at thumbnail size and invisible while scrolling. |
| Spotting a blank page | Scanners produce them constantly. One empty rectangle in the rail is the whole diagnosis. |
| Checking a scan came in the right order | Reading the shape of ten pages takes a couple of seconds. |
Acting on pages from the rail
Thumbnails are not only a map. Select one — or several, with the usual Mac modifiers — and you can rotate, duplicate, extract or delete them without leaving the sidebar. For anything more involved, Organize Pages lays the whole document out as a grid and lets you drag pages around.
Click the first thumbnail, hold ⇧ and click the last to take everything between them. Hold ⌘ and click to add or remove one page from the selection. It behaves the way selection behaves everywhere else on your Mac.
The other four panes
The thumbnail rail is one of five. The outline shows the document's own table of contents, when it has one, as a navigable list. Bookmarks are the places you marked yourself. Annotations lists every mark you have made, so you can step through your own comments. Search finds any word and groups the matches by page.
Between them they cover the two ways people look for something: by what it looks like, and by what it says.
Frequently asked questions
How do I show page thumbnails in a PDF on a Mac?
Open the sidebar with ⌘+1. Thumbnails are the first of its five panes and the one that opens by default.
Can I reorder pages from the thumbnails?
You can rotate, duplicate, extract and delete straight from the rail. For reordering, Organize Pages lays the whole document out as a grid so you can drag pages where they belong.
How do I select several pages at once?
Click one, then ⇧-click another to take everything between them, or ⌘-click to add and remove individual pages. The same modifiers as everywhere else on your Mac.
Do thumbnails work on scanned documents?
Yes. A thumbnail is a small picture of the page, so it works whether the page contains text or a photograph of text.
Is the sidebar free?
Yes. Thumbnails, the outline, bookmarks, the annotations list and search are all free and always will be.