Reassign Default Applications in Mac OS X (Leopard)

Rob — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 13:15:55 +0000

It really irritates me how some applications will ‘steal’ ownership of certain file types on my Mac. The biggest issue I have with this is with images. More often than not, I just want to open an image in Preview to take a quick look at it. I expect that when I double-click on an image file, it will quickly open in Preview. On several occasions, Adobe Photoshop has taken it upon itself to assign itself as the default application for many image types that Photoshop supports (.png, .jpg, etc). If you’re a Photoshop user, you’ll know that it’s not a quick application to start up.

In Microsoft Windows, you can right-click and select ‘Open with’, choose the relevant application and check the box for ‘Always use the selected program to open this kind of file’. This has pretty much always worked for me. Mac OS X has a similar right-click option, but this doesn’t always seem to work system-wide, as you might expect.

In order to make this change system-wide, you need to take a different approach. Right-click on the file you wish to always open in a particular program (the .png file in my case), and select ‘Get Info’. There is a section in the pane that opens for ‘Open with:’, and the ‘rogue’ application should be selected. Choose the required application (‘Preview’ in my case) from the pull-down list, and select the ‘Change All’ button. Confirm that you wish to make this change to all files.

Now when I double-click any .png file, it immediately springs open in Preview, and doesn’t try to launch Photoshop instead.

I’m pretty sure it’s the same procedure for Mac OS X Tiger (10.4) too.

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Reassign Default Applications in Mac OS X (Leopard)