Quick Look worse in Lion

I wonder if Quick Look works in a different way in Lion. Looking at a Finder window in Cover Flow view I see an icon sized representation of my PDFs and Word Docs. The PDFs look fine in Quick Look, but Lion seems to be stuttering when I try to Quick Look a DOC file, as if it's "rebuilding" the preview it uses. The small icon that looks fine in Cover Flow goes gray when I hit the spacebar for Quick Look, and it takes a good 30 seconds of "spinning bars" gray screen before the document is shown. Quick Look also seems to have totally forgotten how to handle Quicktime files. I'm getting icons with the generic "QT" logo in Cover Flow, and when I try to Quick Look I get a gray screen that tells me the basic file info, but does not show the movie. There's an option in the upper-right corner to "Open in QuickTime."

My workflow depends on being able to Quick Look at QuickTime clips. It's a nightmare to have to open each one to see what it is. I hope we can find a fix soon.

I tried swapping out the Lion QuickLook web quicklook generator with the one from Snow Leopard. No change. It looks like Safari is writing bad web archives.

Never mind. It does seem to be a Quicklook bug. Webarchvies from Lion look fine in Snow Leopard.

Bern.bb - Thanks for asking about Perian. I'm running 1.2.2 according to system preferences, which looks like the most recent version on the Perian website. When I first noticed the problem with Quick Look it was with a movie file recorded from an iPhone, so I don't think it's a codec that QT is unfamiliar with.

I experienced as well some differences in between 10.6.8 and the recent 10.7. Quick look in snow allowed me to have a more interactive approach than with the actual version in lion. For instance I could activate links created with Adobe Acrobat Pro within finder's quick look without having to launch acrobat or preview, this was perfect it required no software, finder was sufficient.

Any idea on how to "activate" this feature of yesterdays?

Any advise would be greatly appreciated.

Hi everyone,

I received a suggestion from the community administrator to send the request to bring back the quick look as it was on Snow Leopard to the Apple feedback page.

I think it would be very useful if everybody sends the request too. This is the link:http://www.apple.com/feedback/

This is my message if you want to use it and improve it. Excuse my english, I am a native Spanish speaking.

In previous the previous version of IOX Snow Leopard the "quick look" function of the OS let you preview PDF and pictures in in zoom mode (full width of the PDF and scroll down or up) by clicking Option + Space bar. This was a perfect option to preview files without opening dozens of files that you did not really need. Now in the IOS X Lion when you click Option + Space bar you get a Full screen with full page view that does not help much because it s hard or impossible to read parts of the pdf, picture or file. In other words, it makes "quick look" useless.

I have been posting in the Apple Support Communities for some time and other people have the same problem, and I am also sure many others have the problem but have not the time to write in the communities.

I have waited until new version of the OS Lion 10.7.3 hoping for a fix, but no luck, still the same thing.

I am pretty sure it would not be hard to get the functionality back as it was on Snow Leopard. Or maybe have an option in the system preferences.

Hope this helps.

This problem with PDF Quick Look in Lion is so serious as to keep me using Snow Leopard. There are other issues as well --- mandatory thumbnails and mandatory page-scrolling rather than continuous scrolling. I think the only solution is for users to have preference choices in PDF Quick Look. Also, PDF QL needs to be able to remember window resizing and repositioning from one opening to the next. This subject is also in the thread "Quick Look / Preview issues". Here's my feedback:

PDF Quick Look under Snow Leopard was a great tool, with some annoyances, but under Lion it is useless. I need continuous scrolling, and the ability to resize the window until fonts are readable. Thumbnails are useless and take up screen space. The user needs to be able to set PDF Quick Look preferences. The annoyance in 10.6 is that the PDF Quick Look window would be reset to the default size every time I closed and opened it. The user should have a preference to tell Quick Look to remember its size and position from one opening to the next. Thanks for your attention.

BTW, I would have bought a maxed-out iMac instead of a Mac Mini Server if iMacs were available in matte screen.

Any body knows how to program apple script well? We may be able to create a script or little program that by pressing a keyboard combination will Quick Look with full width any file infinder.

I am starting to learn apple script and may be the solution.

Any ideas?

The only and still best solution I found is to perform a search for all .qlgenerator files, open their Info.plist fies, edit (add if not present) the key values, below and save. You don't even have to enter qlmanage -r in the Terminal. Just invoke Quick Look a couple of times on a file, if the new size doesn't refresh the first time.

To make this task easier, I use Path Finder to search for the .qlgenerator files, show package contents and expand them, select all Info.plist files in one go, and open them in TextWrangler, from which I just perform a Multi-File Search for the <real> string and substitute the values by hand.

<key>QLPreviewHeight</key>

<real>600</real>

<key>QLPreviewWidth</key>

<real>800</real>

Thanks megadroid. I will try this option and see how it works. There is som improvement in Mountain Lion, but still not the same as Snow Leopard.