Leopard Preview Icon Hint

By Ricky Buchanan • December 15, 2007

Icon previews are new in Leopard. Instead of showing one icon for every text document and one for every spreadsheet and so on, you get a tiny peek of what’s inside the document. This is great if you can see tinsy icon-sized pictures, and not so good otherwise. Luckily, Apple left us with some options here.

While you have a finder window open, you can select “Show View Options” from the view menu or press Command-J to bring up the View Options window. Unfortunately this window is very small, but in the fourth section down there’s a checkbox labeled “Show icon preview”. If you uncheck this, your icons will look like they did back in Tiger. If you want to turn icon previews off by default, click the large “Use as defaults” button at the bottom of the window before you close it.

You can also set the default, but then set certain directories to be different - for example set icon previews off by default but on for the “Pictures” folder. Simply set the default as above, then open the “Pictures” folder (or whatever) and set the options that you want for that folder and close the View Options window without pressing “Use as defaults”. You get the best of both worlds!

- ATMac

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Categories: Information, Intellectually Impaired, Neurologically Impaired, Supporters, Users, Vision Impaired
Tags: hide icon preview, icon pictures, icon preview, turn off icon preview

About the Author

Ricky Buchanan

Ricky Buchanan is 33 years old and the founder and main writer for ATMac. She's bedridden with severe CFS/ME or perhaps a primary mitochondrial disorder - the doctors are not sure. When she's not working on ATMac or her other websitse she composes music, listens to audio books, does other disability advocacy, watches TV with her flatmate, and enjoys her cat.

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