Lion’s Finder: Preview column broken

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Macintosh
October 25th, 2011 • 4:32 pm

Either there is something seriously wrong with my machine, or there is something seriously broken in the preview column in column view in Lion’s Finder. More often than not, when I select a picture file in a Finder window in column view mode, I get something like this:

lion-finder-preview

And that’s if I am lucky. If Lion’s Finder is in a particularly bad mood, not only will it not show the dimensions of the picture file, but it won’t even recognize its kind, and will just show “” instead of “Portable Network Graphics image” or “Graphics Interchange Format (GIF)” or whatever the picture file’s kind should be.

I can live without the file’s kind (I know what it is), but the absence of the dimensions is rather irritating, as it forces me to retrieve that information through some other means, which usually involves multiple steps for each and every file.

It’s not like it is only a problem for brand new files that have just been created. I get it for older files as well. And it’s completely random. For any given picture file, when I select it in column view, either the Finder displays all the expected information, or it displays “–” instead in some lines, or some lines don’t even appear at all. Here’s another example:

lion-finder-preview2

This time the “Dimensions” line is not there at all! And then if I just press the Up cursor key once to select the previous file and then Down to reselect the same file, I get this:

lion-finder-preview3

This time, the “Dimensions” line is there, but it contains no information. It’s totally unpredictable.

Needless to say, reporting such a bug to Apple is a major pain, since there is no 100% reliable way to reproduce it. Then again, I hope that it’s so obvious that even Apple’s own developers will have noticed it. Presumably, it’s just not very high on their list of priorities.


One Response to “Lion’s Finder: Preview column broken”

  1. Betalogue » Mountain Lion’s Finder: Problems with ‘More Info’ in inspector window says:

    […] (Lion) had problems with the “Preview” column in column view in the Finder. I wrote a blog post about it at the time. The problems were never addressed by Apple in Lion as far as I […]