Preview in Mac OS X Lion brought with it several improvements and new features like digital signatures, but it also removed some very useful abilities like the file size estimator, Save As, and added the sometimes obnoxious Auto-Save.

If you miss the old version of Preview from Snow Leopard, and you either have a Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard machine or backup handy, you can restore the older version of Preview (5.0.1) from Snow Leopard to run in OS X 10.7 Lion. Here is how to do this without replacing the OS X Lion version of the app (5.5.1), just in case you want to go revert to the newer version again.

From Snow Leopard, make a copy of these folders and transfer them to the desktop of the Mac OS X Lion machine: /Applications/Preview.app

/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/MeshKit.framework/ From OS X Lion, rename the old Preview.app to something else like “PreviewSnow.app” Copy PreviewSnow.app to the /Applications/ folder in OS X Lion Copy “MeshKit.framework” to /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/ in OS X Lion and authenticate the change – this folder should not exist on the Lion machine already and you will not be overwriting anything else

Launch PreviewSnow.app from /Applications and it will run as usual, minus the frustrating Lion features and feature removals. If you want to set PreviewSnow.app as the new default app, right click on an image filetype, select “Get Info” and under the “Open With” menu find PreviewSnow.app and then click the “Change All” button underneath:

A true “Save As” is also back with this version, which is better than using the Export or Duplicate functions for many of us.