Quicklook .PSB (Photoshop Files) in Finder

Figured it out. It's a size limitation at the OS level.

Size as in, not how much space the file takes up, but how many pixels it is in the height or width. And that size appears to be right around 38,990.

Any file with that as the larger pixel dimension in the height or width or smaller will produce an icon. As seen here, it only took a 9 pixel increase to get a file with no icon. Anything larger also will not produce an icon.

You implied that you were previously dependent on a third-party Quick Look plug-in to view those larger PSB images and now that plug-in would appear to not be supported for Sequoia. Unless Adobe creates and installs an appropriate Quick Look engine suitable for displaying all PSB images, you may be out of luck as it is not Apple's role to make Quick Look plug-ins to support Adobe applications and their data formats.

Correction, there's a file size cutoff, too. I took an image that was 38,990 pixels wide and kept duplicating the layer until it failed to produce an icon. At 21.7 GB, it still had an icon. 21.9 GB or above, no icon.

Though even that wasn't consistent. I could start with a 22 GB file and toss layers until the saved file was down to 20.7 GB, or even 17 GB, and it still wouldn't create an icon for either. So why does the 21.7 GB file have one?

I guess we should be happy we get any icons at all. For quite a few years, you never got an icon with a .psb file without the use a third party plug-in.

Feel free to send Apple a bug report.

Feedback - macOS - Apple

Not big enough. The file has to have a minimum of 30,000 pixels in the height or width, or exceeds 2 GB for the saved file size before PS will write a .psb file.

But I couldn't trip up Photoshop or the OS. Photoshop displayed a preview for both a 2.07 GB and 4.23 GB image in its own Open dialogue box.

Highlighting both images on the desktop and pressing the spacebar, Quicklook also showed a preview of either.

And the desktop itself showed an icon of both.

The only place I couldn't get a preview/icon was in the Get Info palette.

Kurt Lang wrote:

Not big enough. The file has to have a minimum of 30,000 pixels in the height or width, or exceeds 2 GB for the saved file size before PS will write a .psb file.

Not sure what that means. I can create .psd files in PSE much smaller than 2 GBs.

But I couldn't trip up Photoshop or the OS. Photoshop displayed a preview for both a 2.07 GB and 4.23 GB image in its own Open dialogue box.

FWIW, the user did say over 4.3 GBs.

Not sure what that means. I can create .psd files in PSE much smaller than 2 GBs.

Not .psd, .psb . I don't know if PSE even has the option to save .psb files.

A file can be less than 30,000 pixels in the height or width, but if the written file is going to be over 2 GB, you still have to use .psb to save it.

Photoshop doesn't convey this very well. Such a file will start to write as a regular .psd, but will halt only when it exceeds 2 GB of data with this message.

Would be much more helpful, and faster for the user if it said to use Large Document Format (.psb) rather than sending you to the help pages.

Kurt Lang wrote:

Not sure what that means. I can create .psd files in PSE much smaller than 2 GBs.

Not .psd, .psb . I don't know if PSE even has the option to save .psb files.

The only option I see in PSE is to save as Photoshop, which in turn are .psd files. I'll check again.

I was testing only with files that had layers, and the pixel size consistently worked. Right up until I started playing with file size (as explained in my follow up post). And it stopped making sense when I could produce a 21.7 GB file that had an icon, but not a file that was only 17 GB in size.

I see. Just curious, how are you creating multi-GB images? I have no image over 1 GB. I had to create a .psd file 20000x11429ppi and it was only 615.7 MB.

Well beats me. I created a 30000 × 16875 image in PSE which was 977.7 MB and still saved as a .psd.

Since I never deal with images near this size, I'm gonna go do something else. 😎

Just figured out, I have approximately 26,000 images on my M3 iMac. If they were all 2 GBs, I would need a 52 TB drive. 🤔