Thumbnails in full screen view

I don't use Photos for Mac very often, but I seem to remember that when viewing a photo in full screen, the thumbnails containing the other photos in the Moment were displayed down the left hand side and were relatively large. Today I find that the thumbnails are displayed along the bottom of the screen and are so small that I can hardly see them! Has something changed in Photos or is it me missing something? I have just upgraded to Sierra.

iMac, OS X Yosemite (10.10.3)

Posted on Oct 11, 2016 3:21 AM

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10 replies

Oct 11, 2016 4:20 AM in response to Jude0569

You're welcome. 🙂


In my small MacBook Pro display the sidebar with the larger thumbnails was much more convenient. Now it is hard to see anything at all in the tiny, tiny thumbnails. On the plus side, I can see more of them. And I can scroll quickly through the thumbnails by scrolling/swiping with two fingers on the trackpad.

Oct 12, 2016 10:08 PM in response to Jude0569

Just spent (wasted) ages looking for a way to change this back. Trouble is, these days, with much becoming less intuitive than it ever used to be with Macs, you never know whether it's yet another feature that's been removed with an update or whether you've clicked a buried setting somewhere. In this case of course it's the former.


I really dislike the horizontal scroll of the thumbnails now. As Leonie said, at the foot of a MacBook they are too small to be useful. Why they don't include an option for vertical or horizontal display is beyond me.

Oct 12, 2016 10:24 PM in response to LarryHN

Yes, my, how could I guess the "tell Apple here" reply was coming. I've sent feedback already. It's a pretty obvious thing to do really and I certainly can't be bothered to type on every post "I've sent feedback already". You obviously missed the opportunity to post it above!!


The option to resize still has the thumbnails displayed in a crunched up row across the bottom. Far less useful to me than the individual images stacked to the side. Still. All part of the drive to turn Mac OS into iOS for Mac. Yet another nail in the coffin for me. Next time round I'll be looking elsewhere. I don't need a 17" iPhone.

Oct 12, 2016 11:21 PM in response to TechAddict

And all thumbs are shown clipped to portrait format, even the landscape photos. The only thumbnail shown with the correct aspect ratio is the currently selected one.

All photos in the screenshot below are landscape photos, but are displayed clipped as portrait photos with half of the photo missing:

User uploaded file


I really like to have a filmstrip below the photos like the split view in Aperture, but it should show the photos in a decent size, and with metadata badge overlays.


I experimented a bit. The height of the panel with the filmstrip seems to be stored in the com.apple.Photos.plist in ~/Library/Preferences.

There is a variable IPXEditorThumbnailBrowserHeight . Initially this variable seems to be set to 50, and by extending the panel we can increase it to 100, but not beyond.


It is possible to set a new default for this height:

  • Quit Photos, if it is running.
  • Launch a Terminal and paste
    defaults write com.apple.Photos IPXEditorThumbnailBrowserHeight 100
    into the Terminal.
  • Log off and on. Now Photos will always launch with the thumbnail panel at this height. Any default larger than 100 will be ignored.

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Thumbnails in full screen view

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