How to disable Leopard’s show icon preview

Ever since I upgraded to Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5) the show icon preview has been driving me nuts. It is turned on by default for all Finder windows.

All of your document icons are changed to previews of their documents as shown in the screenshot above. I find these difficult to scan because the icons are so small. The colourful document icons for PDF, Windows Media and Word files are much easier to read.

To turn off the show icon preview in all of your Finder windows you need to change your Finder preferences. Select any folder and go to Finder>View>Show View Options (Command-J). You’ll see a window similar to the one to the right.

Make sure that Show icon preview at the bottom of the window is unchecked. To make this change for all of your folders, click on the Use as defaults button at the bottom of this window.

I overlooked this last step and kept changing the view options for individual folders instead of all folders.

You can also make your document icons larger in the list view which makes the icon preview easier to see but I still don’t think it is as useful as colourful document icons. You’ll just end up scrolling a lot more and end up looking at file extensions (such as .pdf and .doc) to figure out where specific files are.

Posted in OS X Software at 1:21 PM