Spotlight and Slow Image Previews

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Level 1

25 points

Spotlight and Slow Image Previews

Whenever I use Spotlight to search for images, I've noticed that Spotlight seems to have to rebuild the image thumbnails every-time. It seems to take 4 or 5 seconds for Spotlight to draw each thumbnail. So when I'm looking at a list of 100 images, I have to wait a good while before I can actually see what the images are.
I'm really confused by this since Finder can display thumbnails nearly instantly.
So my question is... Is this just typical behavior for Spotlight and is there a way for me to correct the issue.

eMac 1.25 GHz, Mac OS X (10.4)

Posted on Nov 27, 2005 9:07 PM

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Answer 1

Nov 28, 2005 12:20 AM in response to jjs1138

I tried a Spotlight window search, put it into icon view, and searched for "dietes kind:images" (I've taken quite a few photos of this flower). The jpegs at the top of the page appeared pretty much instantly, but some of the bigger Photoshop files near the bottom seemed to take a second or so to fill in. In fact it seemed a tiny bit speedier than the Finder sometimes seems in drawing some of the thumbs. There were 132 images returned. So it seems to work OK for me, so I wouldn't think it is typical, unless your images are way bigger than mine. The slower ones were in the range of 20 to 30MBs.

Francine
Schwieder

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Answer 2

jjs1138 Author

Level 1

25 points

Nov 30, 2005 11:46 AM in response to Francine Schwieder

I guess the issue has to do with the size of my image files (most of them are around 100MBs). However, all of the images have thumbnails which Finder seems to use so I wonder why Spotlight doesn't use the thumbnails or at least cache the previews it has already created?

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Answer 3

Dec 1, 2005 10:50 AM in response to jjs1138

I have no idea whether Spotlight uses the Finder's facilities to draw thumbnails or not, but I suspect not. I just tried a little experiment: I opened a Spotlight window then went about checking the little boxes on the side so that it showed stuff in my home done in the last year that were images and the search was for psd. All my psd files have a built-in thumbnail, as I set the preference for Photoshop to automatically create one when a file is saved. There were about 300 such files, and it took a noticeable amount of time for all of them to get a thumbnail. I then open my home folder in the Finder and did a Command-F, typed psd in the name field, selected kind: image and set the View option to icon, and then set icons to 128x128. The Finder was returning results as fast as I was doing this, and all the thumbnails were instantly just THERE--while the Finder does not cache thumbnails it has to draw, it does use thumbnails if they are present.

So my tentative conclusion is that Spotlight is behaving as the Finder does when there is no thumbnail present, namely it uses QT to draw one. And, like the Finder, does not cache these.

My recommendation to you is to not use the Spotlight window for your searches, but try using Command-F instead. It is actually superior in a number of ways. I almost never use the Spotlight window. I don't really see the point of it. For a quick search I use the menu bar. For a more precise search I use Command-F.

Francine
Schwieder

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