VIEW AS ICONS...not viewing a thumbnail...just the JPG icon

Be sure that Preview is the default app for opening them.
If you used another editor, the associated app may have changed. I am not sure if this is the reason for your not being able to see the thumbnails, but it might be.
On all my images, the default is Preview.

I have a similar issue, if not the same. I almost always have my folder view set as thumbnail view so that I can see the images without having to open them in Preview. I just realised that I can no longer do that for some reason. Instead of seeing a thumbnail I see large JPG icons. Even loading them into 'Coverflow' doesn't show them, just shows the icons instead.

What did I do to change them to icons instead of thumbnails?

More importantly - how do I get them to show as thumbnails again?

OSX has a set of display icons of different sizes, any of which can be a thumbnail image of the file. Typically, however, image files are created with a generic icon as the small icon to show in icon view and a thumbnail to show when "show icon preview" is selected (I never use coverflow but I believe that it is these previews which show there as well). I take it you are referring to the latter setting. These previews are large and, in my experience, Finder sometimes has a problem loading them, particularly if there are a lot of them in the location you just opened and if anything else is using system resources at the same time. Sometimes the problem corrects itself if you wait. Recently mine spat the dummy completely (I was asking it to display a very large number of previews at the time) and only returned to good behaviour when I logged out and back in again.

I restarted and it fixed the problem. How annoying. I would have thought considering the specs that this iMac has (2.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with 2 gb of RAM) that it would have enough power to view a few thumbnails.

Sheeesh!

If it struggles to achieve such a tiny task as showing thumbnails then geez, I hate to think how it will go handling even a slightly heavy task, like movie editing or something.

Hmmm...

I have the same problem.

Rebooting does not work.

Throwing away the finder plist works - for a short while... not really sure how long, I get busy!

Going to Get Info, and changing the Open With option to Preview (instead of Photoshop) only changes the TYPE of generic jpg icon, from a psd designated one, to an even more generic one. Also, if I select "hide extension" - nothing happens, the extension still shows.

I have seen it suggested that it has something to do with Photoshop, but my other file types are okay. I still get thumbnails for pdfs, tifs and psd files. Not only that, some of the files that still have thumbnails are Photoshop jpgs.

It seems to be only the jpgs that are mixed up. Most of them are currently showing as generic icons again, but a few random images still show thumbnails. They are in the same folders as other files that turned into generic jpg icons... they WERE all thumbnails!

It seems to be the Finder. Throwing away the finder plist seems to be the only thing that affects it. I have heard to try Onyx and run the rebuild launchServices and cleanup scripts (remove caches) then restart. I will be trying this soon.

I also think it has something to do with the Finder because after throwing away the plist, the Finder will progressively begin to misbehave before I notice the generic icons returning. It's very subtle. The first thing I notice is that it will start to open windows in the same view as the last opened window - instead of opening it as it is set to open in View Options / always open in...

It could still have something to do with a conflict between Photoshop and/or Intel based macs.
In writing this and checking files, I have noticed that anything processed up until approx July 2005 maintains the thumbnails. Anything after that keeps losing it's thumbnail. This did not become an issue until I recently got an Intel mac using Leopard and Photoshop CS3.

Until then, I was using Panther and Photoshop CS (and later, CS1) on a PowerPC. It was the switch to Intel that brought it out, but it is happening to files that I had for 2-3 years before getting an Intel mac. The older files are okay, I didn't notice this at first.

So it seems to be the Intel mac combined with CS3 back to CS1?. It seems like we are caught between Apple and Adobe, but it seems to be more on Apple's side - as files that have never been touched by Adobe do not have thumbnails either.

I just hate to think that Apple has not addressed this! It used to be fine, never had a problem.

If Onyx works, I will return and let you know... (or if ANYTHING works!)

There is an option in Automator > Add Thumbnail Icon to Image file.
Maybe worth trying.

Vintuitive wrote:
I almost always have my folder view set as thumbnail view so that I can see the images without having to open them in Preview. I just realised that I can no longer do that for some reason. Instead of seeing a thumbnail I see large JPG icons. Even loading them into 'Coverflow' doesn't show them, just shows the icons instead.

Same problem here...

More importantly - how do I get them to show as thumbnails again?

I successfully followed the advice in another dissucion ( http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1671275). Apparently there were problems with the LaunchServices database. I think I messed it up when the harddisk filled up to the last byte and I had to hard reset my Mac. The suggestion was to paste this into Terminal:

/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/LaunchSe rvices.framework/Versions/A/Support/lsregister -kill -r -domain local -domain system -domain user

I have no idea, what this command does in detail. But after waiting a minute or so it was finished. I rebootet my Mac and thumbnails and cover flows work as expected!