Preview has to be one of the most under-appreciated apps on MacOS. It implements so much handy everyday functionality that requires third-party software on Windows. Or did, last time I used Windows (admittedly some time ago).
On feature that I use a lot in Preview is to combine pdf's.
If you e.g. have a pdf invoice and want to combine that with the corresponding pdf receipt from the bank, I just open the two pdf files side by side in thumbnail view and just drag the pages (thumbnails) I want from one document to the other where I want to place them; rearranging the pages (thumbnails) later if I need to in the same thumbnail view. I am a huge fan of Preview! :-)
Ghostscript is similar to ImageMagick in that it does so much that learning to do one specific thing is hard. But that line merged ~300MB of PDFs together in 20s on my M1. Doing that in Preview causes a beach ball.
I love the integration with iOS as well. I was pleasantly surprised to find an option in Preview to use my iPad and the Apple Pencil for my signature. It even popped up some otherwise hidden UI on the iPad to do so.
Preview has an odd selection of functions, though. On one hand it allows you to do plenty of these functions that you mention, but otoh misses on very trivial stuff like "I'd like to make my image a bit larger so I could paste another one next to it".
Ahh, yes. I have wanted to do this too, and can’t. I suspect Preview isn’t the tool I’m supposed to use, even though it’s the ones I want to use as it doesn’t almost everything I want.
on windows i find myself bouncing around a lot between pdf viewers, choosing between lightweight but feature sparse options (sumatra) and heavier, more featured programs (acrobat, foxit)
