Confused about thumbnail previews

C

Crimguy

Registered
Since upgrading computers to ones running OSX, I and my father, a retired yet borderline professional photographer, have appreciated the OS's ability to display image files as thumbnails in a directory.

However, we've stumbled across a problem that neither Apple nor Canon seem able to figure out:

He recently purchased a Canon 1DS Mark II. The Raw format was, until the past few days, incompatable with Adobe's Raw Filter in Photoshop. It came with it's own image browser, that my dad was using to convert images to TIFF before editing in Photoshop. His procedure has always been to save images to the desktop (I think it's silly, but you try retraining a 73 year old man!). With other files, including ones from photoshop, all images would have a thumbnail preview as the icon.

Not with the 1DS - just a generic image icon. The application that came with the 1DS even has a option to "create thumbnail and save" but that doesn't appear to do anything. He can open the file with Photoshop and re-save it, which results in a thumbnail icon. This is the source of confusion for me:

I'm not sure whether OS X creates image thumbnails or not (I thought it did). The other os'es I use create them without requiring an external app to do anything - I'm speaking of the window managers in linux (KDE and gnome) and Windows 2000. I thought OS X did the same.

Any explanation would be appreciated. Canon and Apple keep blaming each other when he calls ;-D

He's running a Dual 1.8 G5 with Panther (10.3.6 at the moment).
 
No Apple app creates thumbnail previews. You can enable icon previews in the View Options (View>Show View Options...). There is a checkbox for "Show icon preview." It will take a while to generate the previews initially (especially if there are a large number of them), but should work fine afterwards.

Jim
 
That's what I thought. However, the application I referred to above does have a "create thumbnail and save" option. It might be for it's own internal thumbnail. . . Any idea why the os is unable to generate a thumbnail for a fairly large tiff image? I figure this raw converter program that came with the camera is creating a non-standard TIFF image in some way and the OS can't render the image as a result.
 
My guess having watched the thumbnails generate on a slow machine, the OS processes the whole file. Large files are slower to display. If you left the window open overnight, perhaps it would finally display one. All of this is conjecture from my observations.

Also, the OS cannot create an icon preview for some file types. The KB did not say which ones it did or did not.

Jim
 
You could import the photos into iPhoto and from there generate a web page(does a beautiful job of creating a page of thumbnails linked to the images) - not quite what you asked for (i.e. it's thumbnails in a webpage, not in the Finder), but it can be quite useful.

Kap
 
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