Snip, cut and paste image parts with macOS Preview for iOS

Marian König
2 min readJan 26, 2022

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Preview mini includes a simple snipping tool for your iPhone and iPad. Cut, copy and paste. Resize your Selection. Done.

The snipping functionality of the macOS standard app Preview is straight forward and pretty easy to use. Preview mini brings this feature to your iPhone and iPad.

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Select the snipping icon in the upper toolbar.

At first you have to select the snipping mode by tapping the scissor iconed button in the upper right corner of the toolbar. In this mode you are able to copy or cut parts from the image into your clipboard and paste it into another one. Select the regarding image part by dragging from one edge to the other. The size of the selected frame is shown in the pixel pill.

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A pill displays the size of the current selection.

A moveable and resizable frame is added to the screen. Now you can fine-adjust your choice. The four blue dots should be quite familiar and self-explanatory. The orange dot in the upper left corner is used for ratio-based resizing. You can enable or disable the auto-ratio as you like.

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By enabling the auto-ratio the frame will shrink proportionally.

By tapping the selection a menu appears, which offers you three options:

  • Cut out the selected frame and save it in the clipboard.
  • Copy the selected frame and save it in the clipboard.
  • Crop the whole image to the selected frame.
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By longpressing somewhere on the screen the pasting menu appears.

Paste your selection afterwards by a longpress at the position you want to put the cached image part to. If you want to put it to another image just select or import the target one in the left sidepanel and do exactly the same as described above.

Preview mini for iOS is available in the App Store. Check it out for free on your iPhone and iPad.

The images that get edited in this tutorial are provided by the brilliant Pexels artists Fabian Wiktor and Pok Rie. More infos and tutorials on preview-mini.com

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