ImageFolderQLGenerator

ImageFolderQLGenerator will not work in Snow Leopard. This is due to the fact that Quick Look generators are not allowed to generate previews and thumbnails for folders in Snow Leopard. (I know, this sucks.) Due to this I am not developing or maintaining this program anymore.

This is a Quick Look Plugin (or Quick Look Generator) that creates thumbnails and previews for folders that contain image files. The thumbnails and previews it generates look like the normal folder icons, only with small thumbnails of some of the contained images overlaid on top. Here are a couple of screenshots to give you an idea of how it looks:

"Why is the folder icon inside that 'generic document' icon?"

As you can see from the screenshots above, Finder automatically wraps 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!

How it Works:

ImageFolderQLGenerator starts by going through all the files within the folder it gets a reference to, either until it finds X number of image files (determined by the file extension,) or until there are no more files to go through. It then draws the folder icon and on top of that the thumbnails of all of the image files it has found, using first the thumbnails saved into these image files, or if no thumbnails are found, the full image files themselves.

How to Change the Number of Pictures Shown:

By default, a maximum number of two (2) pictures are drawn for folder thumbnails and four (4) for Quick Look previews. If you'd like more or fewer pictures to be shown, you can set the user defaults picturesInThumbnail and picturesInPreview like this:

• To change this value for thumbnails, run this in Terminal (all in one row):
  defaults write org.hasseg.imagefolderqlgenerator picturesInThumbnail -int <NUM>
  (where <NUM> is the maximum number of pictures you'd like to see on your folder thumbnails)
• To change this value for previews, run this in Terminal (all in one row):
  defaults write org.hasseg.imagefolderqlgenerator picturesInPreview -int <NUM>
  (where <NUM> is the maximum number of pictures you'd like to see on your folder Quick Look previews)

Contributing:

If you make improvements to the source of ImageFolderQLGenerator, please let me know. Thanks!

Older Versions: