Image thumbnails in finder

[Lord Blackadder]

I think I solved the problem, but I'm still somewhat puzzled...

One of my bosses is a Mac user, and requires that everyone under her use a Mac. One of my co-workers needed a laptop, so I (who order such things) specced out the laptop I would buy for myself, a 15" powerbook with nearly all the options. It sucked when it arrived and I had to give it to my Mac-hating coworkers to use everyday...<sigh> anyway...

She has several thousand digital photos (jpeg) taken by our super-duper-expensive Olympus microscope camera which she uses regularly. She organized them on her previous XP laptop by selecting "thumbnail" in the view menu when browsing through folders of images. The images themselves reside on a network drive.

Browsing through on the powerbook they just come up as a Preview document with the generic "jpeg" icon. She complained that she couldn't see the pictures and since she uses nondescript file names it was becoming difficult to find what she was looking for. I just imported everything into iPhoto and made a few albums which shut her up nicely. So, problem solved.

However, IS there a way to have all the jpegs show up as thumbnails in the finder? On my machine at home I use iPhoto and the GIMP and I used to use Graphic Converter, which (in OS 9) made thumbnails that appeared in the finder by default. I searched the forums and found a couple of threads that suggested increasing the size of the icons (and yes, I did select icon view). Will increasing the size of the icons cause a thumbnail to be displayed after a certain size threshold is reached, or do the images need to be saved by a program that will create a thumbnail (like exporting from iPhoto)?

I'm not in front of a Mac right now so I can't fart around with this, so pardon the probably dumb question but I'm curious and I can't leave work just yet to fool around at home.

 

[decksnap]

1) I believe if you have iPhoto set correctly, it will generate thumbnails of the real files when you import. Perhaps you can drag your images into iPhoto and then drag them back out afterward.

or

2) Use iPhoto for image browsing. That's what it's there for.

or

3) Use photoshop's image browser to browse the images

or

4) Get a program like Thumbnail Pro. It is cheap and lets you batch process folders of images in the finder to give them image icons.

 

[r6girl]

there is a way to get thumbnails to show as a small version of the jpg it represents! in the View menu, select Show View Options and click the "Show Icon Preview" box. the generic jpeg icons will then change to show the actual picture.

i've found that this doesn't work, however, when i'm trying to select a thumbnail (as opposed to the full jpg version) to upload to ebay or something. i first need to open a finder window to identify the thumbnail i need, remember the name, and then go back to whatever other program i'm using to select it. not sure why that is...

hope that helps!
marianne

 

[iJoe]

In the Finder hit command+J and check the 'show image preview' box.

Hope this helps.

 

[thequicksilver]

Yep. Within the Finder, hit Cmd-J. Hit the 'All Windows' Radio button. Choose 'Show icon preview'. If you feel like it, jack up the size of the icons too.

 

[decksnap]

Note the above method doesn't actually give you the image icons all the time- like in list or column view, icons still may not show up. To get this, you really need something like Thumbnail pro.

 

[Lord Blackadder]

Thanks people, the recent technical difficulties kept me from getting in the MR forum for a bit...

Right now iPhoto seems to have satisfied the needs of the thumbnail-obsessed, but I'll try iJoe's key combo.

EDIT...I actually did try this earlier now that I think about it, though I accessed the menu my mousing through the menu bar rather than a key combo. For some reason selecting "show icon preview" did not display the thumbnails (on the network drive), so either I made the incredible n00b mistake of fiddling with options when the network drive's finder window was not active, or the images on the network drive do not contain a thumbnail at all. Incidentally, the images imported into iPhoto already display as thumbnails.