If you installed OS X 10.5 (Leopard) as an ‘update’ (ie. all of your Tiger apps remained installed) and had previously customized your Finder toolbar, you may be missing out on a very neat new feature, Quick Look. This overview will show you how to add it to your toolbar (if needed) and explain how to use it.
- If the Quick Look icon isn’t a part of your toolbar yet, just right-click (ctrl-click) somewhere in the toolbar background and select Customize Toolbar.
- Drag the Quick Look icon to your toolbar and click Done.
- Now select a folder, and click the Quick Look button. A window will appear displaying the folder name, the number of files it contains, the total size of all the files combined, and the time it was last modified. Hint: instead of clicking the Quick Look button, you can also just press the space bar. Yep, that’s the keyboard shortcut for Quick Look. Absolutely. Brilliant.
- Locate an image, select it and then click the Quick Look button again. Hint: if you leave the Quick Look window open, you can actually skip having to click the button – the window itself will automatically update to display the last file/folder that you selected.
- Click the ‘arrows’ (see screenshot below) and the Quick Look window will go into full-screen mode.
- When video files are selected, you can actually play them from within Quick Look.
- If you select multiple images you can run them as a slideshow, or view them all as a grid by clicking the Index Sheet button. Hint: if you select multiple files/folders – of any type – you can also go into grid/index mode. And slideshow will work too.
- Select an image from the Index Sheet view and that image will be displayed.
- As you may have guessed – if you select an audio file it can be played in Quick Look too. If the album artwork is available for that song, it will be displayed too.
- While an item is displayed in Quick Look, you can use the keyboard combo ctrl + c to copy it to your clipboard.
Thanks for featuring my photos in your Quick Look piece!
I can’t stand Quicklook primarily because I use the space bar to select the first file alphabetically and there is no setting to change this to another key.
How can I disable Quicklook?
thanks for the tip, makes it so much easier than clicking
i’ve even set it has a right click on the wacom pen
OK, but does anybody know what is the keyboard shortcut for displaying index sheet (thumbnails)?