I’m becomming increasingly more addicted to the new QuickLook feature in Leopard.  Can you please provide a plug-in for viewing IMAGE files from within the Finder?

_mike

I can see them allright in CoverFlow and QuickLook… For those old image files that that had the original “film strip” icon preview in the finder, I had to resave them from Photoshop to get the icon display the preview.

Rick

Interesting, all of my image files (new and old) have the filmstrip icon, and they all show that icon not the content in Coverflow and Quicklook....weird.  I am running v7.0.

_mike

Have you tried a save as in Photoshop to reset the preview on any of them?

OK, now i see them, but that mean that PShop is writing the file info correctly, but camera is not?  I would rather I simply be able to see these previous from Finder directly from Camera.

_mike

Did not notice that before… Same here: new image files created only show the Filmstrip icon. Wasn’t it always like that?
I never realized that for I open everything in Photoshop therefore I always get the correct icon.

Rightm and that gets to my original request.  As part of Leopard, Apple has released some small API that allow developers to generate Quicklook previews.  These are called “generators”, in particular, it is the LPreviewRequest API.

Anyway, I completely realize this is a Mac specific item, and really just one of those “nice to haves”, not really part of the core product.

I would still like to see it

_mike

It is already “working”. To preview a img-movie, you can type into Terminal.app ...

qlmanage -c public.movie -p sample.img

... and use “public.image” for an image. So what we need to do is tell OSX that “*.img” is compatible to a movie/image. You need to have the QuickTimeComponent for EI-images installed.

Patrick

OK, well things aren’t too happy on my machine.

If I run the ‘qlmanage’ command with public.movie, I get a good preview.  If I run ‘qlmanage’ with public.image, I just get the filmstrip icon again.

In Finder Quicklook, the .image icons are those of Disk Images.  When I hit the space-bar to open in Quick look, I get the Filmstrip icon in the QL window.

Still no love on getting the actual image in Quick look.

Any ideas?

_mike

Apparently it is important to tell QuickLook whether it shall display a still or a movie. But EI uses the same extension for both. So probably we dont get around writing an “autodetecting QuickLook” component for it :(

Patrick

I’m afraid the problem isn’t in QuickLook, instead it is in the UTI system. Apple adopted UTIs as a replacement for other filetype designators including: TYPE/Creator codes, file extensions, MIME types. Unfortunately, it isn’t implemented well and the underlying system still relies on file extensions.

I added some code to Animator to export the .img (EIDI type) as a UTI. Looking in the launchservices database I can see that the UTI is properly registered on my machine. However, QuickLook still does not work....and here is why: Apple is still depending on unique file extensions to determine the type of file AND Apple has reserved the .img extension for the now obsolete version 4.2 disk image file.  So when QuickLook attempts to open our .img file, the system insists that it is a disk image and it can’t interpret the file properly.

What should happen is that LaunchServices should realize that there is more than one .img UTI and then use the only TYPE to determine which is the correct one. It does not do this.

I have posted this problem on Apple’s QuickLook developer forum. Apple has said this is a “weakness” in the UTI system. Other Mac developers have called it a bug and have filed bug reports with Apple. Nothing has been done by Apple to address this issue.

I have filed a bug with Apple. It is #5745656

Thanks Matt.  I agree, Apple calling this a “weakness” is a bit silly.  Thanks for following up!

_mike