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I'm running the latest version of OS X and Preview is hanging whenever I try to start it.

It attempts to open the documents which I previously had open, which is ~10 PDFs and ~3 PostScript files, and it seems to be permanently get stuck whilst "converting" those PostScript files (even though opening them was no issue before).

Hence my question is, how do I start Preview without opening those documents? (I'm guessing there's some kind of cache I should delete.)

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5 Answers 5

Reset to default
3

Do you want to disable the App re-open the documents when you launch the App? So, you can go to "System Preferences" > "General" and enable the "close windows when quitting and app" option.

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  • That has always been enabled, I guess Preview ignores that (in the case of a crash, at least).
    – Frano Aleksi
    Dec 28, 2014 at 3:50
  • you can check the "Saved state", goto the "~/Saved Application State/com.apple.Preview.savedState" directory and check
    – nelson
    Dec 28, 2014 at 4:26
  • I think you mean "~/Library/Saved Application State/com.apple.Preview.savedState"
    – Henry Story
    Mar 1, 2018 at 10:09
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To amplify what Nelson said above, here are the full list of steps which worked for me on OSX 10.10.2:

Quit Preview if it’s running.

Hold down the option key and select Go ▹ Library from the Finder menu bar. From the Library folder, delete the following items, if they exist:

      Containers/com.apple.Preview

      Preferences/com.apple.Preview.LSSharedFileList.plist

      Preferences/com.apple.Preview.SandboxedPersistentURLs.LSSharedFileList.plist

      Saved Application State/com.apple.Preview.savedState

Log out and log back in. Launch the application and test.

Credit to Linc Davis, on this page.

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2

OSX 10.10

When you want to quit first close (hit the red circle) on all the windows/documents that the app has open. Then Quit the app.

I have several windows/documents (in textedit) that I leave open when I quit, so they will open when I reopen the app, it works with most OSX 10.10 apps. I use them as a sort of note pad, NOTE: if the system crashes you could loose the data if they have not been saved at some time.

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  • This is of no help when preview crashes as soon as it starts, as in the problem of the OP. You can't close windows of a crashed app.
    – Maarten Derickx
    May 26, 2018 at 14:06
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You can do a Finder search for com.apple.preview and find the files you need to remove:

From Terminal, you can go to
~/Library/Saved\ Application\ State/com.apple.Preview.savedState/

There you can remove the window_*.data files that include your previously open file list.

You can also remove windows.plist and that gets rid of all of them.

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  • this worked for me.
    – ams
    Sep 20, 2017 at 16:01
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This worked for a colleague: you can type alt/optcmdW when opening Preview, then quit an re-open.

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