Friday, May 26, 2023

Disabling Quick Look In-Icon Previews

Craig Hockenberry:

This is ridiculous.

If you don’t have enough space to show paging arrows, you certainly don’t have enough space to view the content.

[…]

Where there’s a will, there’s a way. To disable movie, PDF, and other useless previews, but still maintain the image on the icon, use this from Terminal:

$ defaults write com.apple.finder QLInlinePreviewMinimumSupportedSize -int 512

Then relaunch the Finder.

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So happy to learn there's actually a workaround for this. Those in-icon previews have been a pet peeve of mine ever since they were introduced who knows when. (15 years ago?) Classic case of looks-impressive-in-a-demo, awful-to-use-in-real-life.

Video files are especially frustrating because the center of the icon—the exact area you aim your mouse at when you want to select or drag a file—turns into a play button. Playing an icon-sized video is the most useless thing ever, and gets in the way of working with files.

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