ellwoodje01: Replace older grainy thumbnails in Finder

Tuesday, 10 May 2011

Replace older grainy thumbnails in Finder

It seems that older photos retain their tiny, pixelated, thumbnails. They are not very helpful in Cover Flow view.

Here is the easy way to improve this:

Choose cover flow view so that you can pick out the low resolution thumbs. Order the list by date, putting the older, pixelated ones at the bottom. Select only the pixelated images. (This trick will not work if any of the files have a higher resolution thumbnail. I'm not sure why.)

Choose Inspector (Command+Option+I) and select the multiple thumbnail icon in the upper left hand corner, just left of the number of items.

Press Delete. All the thumbnails will now be regenerated at normal resolution.

It's possible this hint has been posted earlier. I did a quick search and didn't see anything.

[crarko adds: I did a quick search and didn't find anything either. I didn't have any of the low resolution thumbnails on the images on my MacBook to try this.]