Preview icons randomly missing

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Level 3

870 points

Preview icons randomly missing

In 10.4 all my JPEGs had preview icons. I could browse finder in icon mode and see image picture.

In 10.5.5 some of them are gone. There doesn't seem to be any reason to it. Also new images managed and exported from iPhoto may be missing icons.

I wonder if it's a bug related to color space embedding (sRGB vs. Adobe RBG for example).

Whatever the cause it's a REALLY obnoxious bug.

Any tips.

Update:

I'm not alone, so this is clearly an OS X 10.5 bug.

Just found this, I'll try the same fix:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=8089997&tstart=0

This talks about rebuilding launchServices:

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=2003121514443048

Message was edited by: jfaughnan

G5 iMac 20, Mac OS X (10.5.5), MacBook Core-2 Duo, G3 iBook, Mac mini

Posted on Nov 27, 2008 9:00 PM

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Answer 1

jfaughnan Author

Level 3

870 points

Nov 28, 2008 6:09 AM in response to jfaughnan

The http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=8089997&tstart=0 tip worked, the running the rebuild script as a non-admin user didn't seem to do anything.

I downloaded the latest version of Onyx ( http://www.titanium.free.fr/pgs2/english/download.html), rebuilt LaunchServices, ran the clean scripts to clear out various caches, and restarted.

My JPEG preview image icons are back.

Given the number of people hit by this there's clearly a bug here. If the LaunchServices database is prone to corruption one fix would be to make it more robust, another would be to rebuild as part of the weekly or monthly maintenance scripts OS X runs.

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Answer 2

Jan 31, 2009 3:50 PM in response to jfaughnan

I was having a similar problem, and tracked it back to an old version of the GIMP I had installed. Basically, icons would preview fine (and any icons that had had a preview built before would work forever.) Until, that is, the Finder saw a .xcf (Gimp) file. Then I wouldn't get any previews created for new icons the Finder saw after that until I relaunched the Finder. So, I'd end up with a mixture of working previews (the ones the Finder had already generated) and the default icon (the ones where the Finder still wanted to generate a preview.

So, basically, the problem looked random, but there was some logic to it. I guess that that particular version of the Gimp managed to break the Finder in some horrid way when it was asked to generate a preview (the Finder farms this job out to installed applications for some file types, of course.)

So, anyone else with this problem -- do you happen to have an old version of Gimp.app, or any odd or beta or otherwise flaky bits of graphics software installed that generate their own Finder previews for their files? If so, try updating or removing them, relaunching the Finder and seeing if everything gets back to normal. I found my problems went away when moving from Gimp 2.6.3 to 2.6.4.

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