Forgetting opened documents in Preview

finderpreview

Sometimes, opening one or more very large pdf documents will cause Preview to crash. When this happens, I usually open preview by double clicking on its icon in Applications while holding down the shift key. This prevents the previously opened documents from being opened again.

However, today, for some reason, that's not working. If I open Preview while holding down shift it still tries to open all the documents that were open when it crashed, and consequently crashes again.

I'm imagining the list of open documents is stored in a plist file somewhere, but there are currently no files in ~/Library/Application Support/Preview, so it's not there. Is there some other place to look for it?

I'm on OS X 10.11 if that makes a difference. I know it's old and have no intention of updating.

Best Answer

After some googling and experimentation, I found that I can fix this by deleting the folder ~/Library/Containers/com.Apple.Preview/. Hopefully this will be helpful if someone else has the same problem.

From a comment below by Joy Jin, it seems the specific folder is

~/Library/Containers/com.apple.Preview/Data/Library/Saved Application State/com.apple.Preview.savedState

Deleting only this folder should resolve the issue without affecting other settings. (I haven't tested this.)

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