How to Edit Files From Quick Look on Mac (Markup)

Quick Look isn't just for looking. Press Space on an image or PDF, click the pencil icon, and the full markup toolset appears — draw, annotate, sign, crop, rotate — all without launching an app. Videos get a trim control the same way. Here's everything hiding behind that little pencil.

Open markup from a preview

1. Select the file in Finder and press Space.
2. Click the markup button — the pencil-tip circle in the Quick Look toolbar.
3. The window grows a toolbar of editing tools; make your changes.
4. Click Done to save, or Revert to abandon the edits.

One thing to internalize before you sign your first PDF this way: Done saves into the file itself — there's no "Save As" step. For anything irreplaceable, duplicate first (Cmd + D in Finder) and mark up the copy.

What you can do to images and PDFs

• Sketch and Draw — freehand strokes; Sketch smooths your line into a clean shape, Draw keeps it raw. Color and line-weight controls sit at the right of the toolbar.
• Shapes — rectangles, circles, lines, and arrows, plus a magnifying loupe for calling out fine print.
• Text — a movable text box; set font, size, and color from the style button. Combined with shapes, this covers the "circle it and label it" screenshot workflow end to end.
• Sign — the same signature tool as Preview, with signatures you've captured on the trackpad or camera. Space, pencil, sign, drag into place, Done: a signed PDF in about fifteen seconds, no app windows involved.
• Rotate and crop — the rotate button turns the whole image 90° per click; the crop tool drags a frame around what to keep. (Rotate also sits directly in the plain Quick Look toolbar for images — no markup needed.)

On a PDF, markup works page by page as you scroll, and annotations land as standard PDF annotations — the same kind Preview makes, visible in any reader.

Trim video and audio

Preview a video or audio file and the markup pencil is replaced by a trim button. Click it and the familiar yellow trim bar appears around the timeline:

1. Drag the yellow handles to enclose the part you want to keep — the dead air at the start of a screen recording is the classic target.
2. Press play to check the boundaries.
3. Click Done and save the trimmed result.

It's the same trim QuickTime Player offers, minus launching QuickTime — for lopping the ends off a recording, the preview window is all you need.

Where this fits, honestly

Quick Look markup is built for the ten-second edit: annotate a screenshot before pasting it into Slack, sign the one-page form, straighten a sideways photo, trim a clip. What it lacks is everything around the edit — no undo history after Done, no export options, no format conversion, no resizing. The moment an edit has stakes or steps, open the full markup workflow or Preview instead. But for the daily flood of small fixes, the pencil in the preview is the fastest editor on the Mac precisely because it never opens one.

You've met this toolset elsewhere, by the way — it's the same markup that appears when you click a screenshot's floating thumbnail, mark up an attachment in Mail, or edit a photo insert in Notes. macOS reuses one markup engine across all of them, so the fifteen seconds you invest learning the tools here pay off in half a dozen places. Learn it once in Quick Look, where it's easiest to experiment on a duplicate, and every other markup surface on the Mac becomes familiar territory.