Quick Look Plugin/Generator for Image Folders

One of the things that I've always thought Windows XP did better than OS X is how it displays the thumbnails of contained images on the icons of folders that have image files inside them. I always felt this to be quite useful, but couldn't think of any reasonable way to implement it on the Mac before OS X Leopard came along with its Quick Look plug-in architecture.

So I wrote a Quick Look plugin for just that. I call it ImageFolderQLGenerator and its results, when viewed within Finder, look like this:

Implementing the plugin itself wasn't very difficult, even for someone as inexperienced in C as me, but the biggest headache has been something that I've yet to find a solution to: as you can see, Finder automatically wraps folder thumbnails into these "icon decors" with their page curls and drop shadows and whatnot -- I haven't found any way to prevent this from happening. As far as I know, Finder decides if it wants to do that based on the type of the content (in this case, folders) and there's nothing you can do to influence its choice. If someone knows a cure for this, please let me know!

You can download ImageFolderQLGenerator here. I've released it under the Apache License version 2.0.