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