Photoshop thumbnails display improperly in Finder colum view

I don't know who goofed up what in the Tiger Finder, but it looks like it is not going to be fixed. Aside from Column view, you'll also see the alpha channel applied in the GetInfo preview, and if you do a Command-F search and have it display by Groups (the default view no less) you'll see the same problem. What's really weird is you can see the composite thumbnail disappear before your eyes as you scroll the search window, so the Finder initially displays the composite and then redraws the thumb, applying the mask. I guess someone thought it was a good idea....
Francine


Francine
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Don't be so hard on OSX. It does after all display previews of images with standard alpha masks. Who knows what internal file format Adobe uses for their proprietary files. And whether or not they would give Apple permission to render them correctly.

BTW, are you sure it's not a layers problem and unrelated to the alpha channel?

As I mentioned above you can see the mask being applied by Finder to the composite thumb if you have a large enough number of these type files in Group view in a search results window. And if you open the file and have two or more alpha channels, you can rearrange their order and change the appearance of the thumb, so YES it is the alpha channel, has nothing to do with layers. Furthermore, this is new behavior in Finder. It didn't do this before, and we're talking about going all the way back to psd files created many years ago and displayed correctly in Finder versions going back to at least 7.5, through OS X Panther.

When I first noticed it I thought I had simply forgotten and left an alpha channel active when I saved the file. I soon discovered that was not the case: the alpha channel can be UNchecked, and Finder still applies it. This would be "a feature, not a bug" if in fact Finder applied the mask if it was active, but that is not the case. Finder used to work with these files in all views, and it still does work correctly in List and Icon view, using the Photoshop custom thumb in those views. This all means the problem has nothing whatsoever to do with Adobe's file format. In fact, Finder is actually reading the format, rather than displaying the proper thumb that is in the file's resource fork, in order to do its deed in the specific views affected by the problem, while it displays the provided thumb (as it should) in other views.

Send feedback to Apple:

http://www.apple.com/macosx/feedback/

I did way back when I first noticed this problem. And let us hope it is fixed in the next version of Finder. I doubt anything is going to change in Tiger at this late date.
Francine


Francine
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