Image Thumbnails
 

Think Tiger's Finder will include support for a Thumbnail view for picture and movie files, similar to that of XP?

Open folder, set to Icon view, view options, set icon size: from 16x16 all the way to 128x128. As long as the file has a preview, you'll see your thumbnails.

cwtnospam,

I do hope that with Tiger the functionality you're talking about REALLY works as it should, because at the moment it's completely unuseful.
I'm going to explain.

I have a new iMac G5, 1.8 Ghz with 1 Gb of RAM. What happens is that if I create a Finder folder with the options you are talking about set, and I try to copy 50/60 jpegs coming from a digital camera into it, the Finder sucks all the CPU and does not finish its job.
I'm compelled to kill it.
With thumbnails activated, the Finder shows preview too slowly to be accettable and/or usable.
With a friend of mine tried also on a Powerbook, same operations, same behaviour.

-- bugfixer

Are you using "show icon preview" under View Options, or have you created icons for all your pictures (with something like Pic2Icon)?

Could it be that you're waiting because 50/60 files coming from the digital camera are coming over USB 1.1?

I have no problems on my Dual G5, and neither does my wife on her 1.6 Ghz iMac G5, but we usually use iPhoto for dealing with that many images.

I've used Finder options. The jpegs are from a 5 megapixel camera...

-- bugfixer

The pictures can be copied over USB 2 or from a DVD, or from another folder. The effect of slowness of Finder is present even if the jpegs are already into the folder. If you select the Finder option to show the preview, you'll notice a 1 picture each second building time. If you scroll down the windows, Finder gets all the CPU available and sometimes does not complete its job and you're compelled to kill it with the shell. I wait 1 or 2 minutes for thumbnails that are never created.
iPhoto can be a solution, or even GraphicConverter creating its own thumbnails. What is suprising me is this bug is really annoying and it has never fixed.

Thank you for interest,
-- bugfixer

I just tried it with 122 images in a folder on my Dual G5. I can scale the previews (icon mode) in real time.

I suggest booting from the install cd and running disk utility to repair disk and repair permissions.

Kind of you to answer so promptly, but the problem is not scaling, but to build the previews the first time.
In the middle of building, Finder sucks all the CPU and stops building thumbnails.... This can be done on a different mac, too, but the same os (10.3.8).

thanks - bugfixer

Does it work if you take a couple of pictures at a time?

Yes, it works. The thing I do to put Finder in that condition is the following:

1) Create a new folder with options set for showing thumbnails
2) Copy from a DVD or a CompactFlash card 50/60 jpegs (5 Mpixel, so about 2/3 Megs) all together (select all and then drag them all to the new folder)

What I see is that Finder tries to update thumbnails while copying and gets all the cpu. It never ends the operation. After I kill it, I see all the pictures newly copied (when Finder comes back).
I've reinstalled the full OS, with combo update to 10.3.8. no way to make it work.

Try it and it will fail.

-- bugfixer

Let's assume you have 50 pictures that are 2MB each, for 100MB total.

So, Finder is copying and generating thumbnails for 100MB worth of pictures, which causes it to hop the CPU. Perhaps it shouldn't, but, personally, I'm not surprised. Have you tried not copying and generation thumbnails at the same time?

If you access these pictures frequently through the Finder, you should consider using Pic2Icon or GraphicConverter to create custom icons for each file.

Guardian34,

I am surprised: I'm coming back to Mac after a Win pause in my digital life, and I can tell that a 3 years old pc with winXP does the job...
Anyway I will follow your advice to use a 3rd party software to create thumbnails, but I expect Tiger will fix this bug - I'm talking about the fact that it's not only slow, the Finder blocks the computer and never ends its job.

Thank for your help,

-- bugfixer

I agree with bugfixer, XP handles image and video folders pretty nicely. The thumbnails come up for pictures almost instantaneously and quickly for videos as well. OS X takes a little while to create the thumbnails, and does not support video thumb nails.

Also, XP folders can be assigned a view and every time you open that folder it uses the view you've chosen. It seems that I always have to change the view back to Icon when I open my pictures folder.

Just a small grievanace with OS X.... hopefully the Finder improves on this in tiger.

View your window as Columns. You'll see video thumb nails.

OS X takes longer to create thumbnails because they're scaleable from 16x16 pixels to 128x128.

I think the overall problem is that the Finder... has alot of room for improvement.

If you only have a few movies were you really want a thumbnail, there's an indirect way of doing it:

1. Copy a frame from the video
2. Save as an image
3. Create an icon for the image (see earlier post)
4. Copy that icon to the video file
5. Delete the image

Personallly, I've only done this for a few personal clips. I wouldn't expect someone to do this all the time.

No, it doesn't -- the support and behavior is about the same in terms of file types it will auto-thumbnail.

The good news is that it seems MUCH faster overall, and should help with folks who have Finder choking on big directories.

Did you receive your copy yet?

I'm a frequent customer of MacMall, but the first rule of MacMall is you don't talk about MacMall until the 29th :P

I'm sorry, but this just isn't the same. XP handles the thumbnail preview of movies so much better. It's hard for me to believe that Apple still has not added this functionality to finder. I love this feature in XP, and really miss it.



It seems to me that somebody could write a cool script utility to run on a folder of movies to generate thumbnails for them, and set them up as you suggested above... :-)

Wyatt

set movie icons
 

QuickTime has an option, under the view menu, to set the "Poster Frame", which is supposed to be the icon of the movie in the Finder (it is supposed to default to the first frame of the movie). This has never worked for me. However, which I believe was also a hint a long time ago on the main site, it is rather easy to do anyway- pause the movie in Quicktime on the frame you would like to be the icon, simply copy (command+c), go to Finder, select (highlight) the movie file, then do a Get Info (command+i), highlight the icon in the upper left, then paste (command+v).
In other words, no need to make an icon- just copy the video frame and paste as a normal icon.

The apps listed above (and some other), should achieve this.

don't rely on the finder
 

Why don't you use the download software that came with your camera it should do this aswell as some other simple editing goodies?


seems like a no brainer.....




RGB

use preview.app!
 

I use XP at work (yuck) and I use the thumbnails view a lot for finding pictures.

With 10.4 I think browsing through images is so much better. I take an entire images folder, or a group of images, and drag them from the finder to the Preview.app icon in my dock (I keep it there for this reason). A powerful preview of the pictures opens up very quicky and in preview you can scroll through them, resize the window to whatever viewing size you want, change their names, AND drag the pics right out of preview into another app like photoshop or graphic converter. (This all works quickly on both my G5 imac and my older G3 ibook).

Honestly, I find this MUCH more functional for previewing folders of images than the XP thumbnails. :D

CocoThumbX
 

If you decide to generate preview icons for the pic files, I suggest CocoThumbX; it has an awesome GUI, a rich feature set, blazes through Gigabytes of images, and best of all, it's free. Since it operates via drag and drop, and can process files to an unlimited hierarchical depth, CocoThumbX is perfect for large batch processing jobs.

And no, I don't get paid by the developer, although I should be.

:p

Anybody figure out a way to do video thumbnails for a few thousand files in a folder yet? I was really suprised this wasn't added to Finder within Tiger. XP still does this. Come on Apple!. Read this post. This is such a great feature. I hate XP, but love their movie thumbnail feature.

In the mean time it seems to me that someone could write a script to go through a folder and make the first frame of a movie the icon for the file.

Even Linux has this feature. Gnome's file explorer nautilus uses the open source "totem-video-thumbnailer" software to generate the previews.

Regards,

Wyatt

Ohhh Baby. I have found a quick solution. As mentioned above CocoThumbX does pics, but as of their latest version, it now creates thumnbail previews for movie files. I just tested it and it works perfectly. Until Apple adds the feature, I highly reccommend this software.

http://www.stalkingwolf.net/software/cocothumbx/


Wyatt

Great tip! CocoThumbX does the job perfectly.

I agree with this. I copy off of a card reader, list view, no icons, and it takes over the Finder on my well-maintained G4 where no other copy operation causes this kind of delay.

If you were using the Filmstrip view in Windows, there would be much nicer, bigger previews than the Mac's small 128x icons and it would not require opening an additional app like Preview. At least Tiger added the slideshow in Finder, that helps to preview a folder.

I am siding with those saying the Finder does have some problems and does have a little catching up to XP to do in this area.

At first I was skeptical, I usually pick the image I want to represent the video and not some automated utility that insists on capturing the first frame, which is usually black. However, I did not like how I could not tell my movies from my pictures.
I was pleasantly surprised to find that CocoThumbX not only put a filmstrip border to distinquish it from being a photo, it also set a random frame as the icon. I also noticed that if I redrag the video file onto CocoThumbX, it will drop a different frame into the preview icon.

CocoThumbX has some cool advanced settings. I personally prefer to have a big thumbnail of the movie with no border, this way I can more clearly see what move it is. I keep all my movies in "movie" folders therefore I don't have any confusion with picture files. In addition to CocoThumbX picking a random frame for the thumbnail, in the settings you can set it up to choose the first frame, random frame, or so many seconds into the movie. Pretty cool... I really love this software...

Wyatt