17 Things You May Not Know About Quick Look

Quick Look allows you to preview files in the Finder. But you can also do other things with it like rotating and editing images, trimming videos, scroll through documents and select text to copy, view multiple files as an index sheet or slideshow and more.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Here's some things you may not know that you can do with Quick Look. 
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So Quick Look is a way for you to preview files without opening them. In the Finder you can select a file, like this photo here, and then just simply use the spacebar to bring up the Quick Look window. You can also use File and then Quick Look or Command Y to do exactly the same thing. The spacebar is pretty much what everybody uses and you can use the spacebar to dismiss it as well. 
Now the first thing I want to show you is that you can, of course, move and resize this window. It may seem obvious but actually a lot of people don't know you can do this. So you can move it around and if it takes up too much space you can grab any corner here and shrink it down and then move it to somewhere out of the way.
Now I want to point out that sometimes when you bring up Quick Look you see this. You'll see either a very small icon or maybe you won't see the file at all. One of the most common reasons for this is you're using iCloud Drive and this file isn't downloaded right now. You can see the little cloud icon there. You can simply click on that and it will download completely. Once the file is actually present on your local hard drive then Quick Look will work as you expect. 
Now another thing some people don't realize is you don't have to bring up Quick Look and dismiss it for every single file. So say I want to preview a bunch of files here in the Finder. I can bring it up. Some people will dismiss it, go to the next file, and bring it up again. You don't need to do that. With Quick Look open you can actually select another file. Notice how I can select another file and the Quick Look window doesn't go away. You can use the arrow keys to move around in the Finder just as you would normally and Quick Look will always show whatever it is you have selected. So I can just use up and down arrows keys here and easily preview all of these files. If you resize the window and move it, it will stay put as you do that. As a matter of fact resizing the window guarantees that the window stays the same size. Notice here how it changes size to fit the photo. But if I resize the window, even just a little bit, now it is going to stick to that size as I move through the files. 
Now if you want to preview something full screen, you can. You can use spacebar to bring this up and then click this button here and it goes into full screen mode. You can click here to exit full screen or here to just simply close Quick Look. But a quick way to do this is use Option Spacebar. This goes right to full screen mode. Then to dismiss this just use the Escape Key. 
Now you can select more than one file at a time and then bring up Quick Look. I'm going to select these five photo files right here. Then I'm going to tap the spacebar on my keyboard and it will bring up the most recent one selected, so the last one. But I can use these buttons here to move through all of them. I can use left and right arrow keys as well to go through all of them. Then there is also this button here. Click this button and now you'll see everything selected in kind of a Contact Sheet. If you want to go to a single one of these just click it and then it goes back to the regular mode and you could get back to the Contact Sheet there. 
Now when you've selected more than one thing and you go to full screen mode then you get a special set of controls here. You can go to the Contact Sheet or Index Sheet like that. Jump into one of these. You can use the arrow keys and these buttons here to go through them. You can also use the Play button and it will actually do a slideshow hands free. 
Now when you go into Quick Look a button you'll see here at the top right is Open With. It will open with the default app if you click that button. That's really handy for if you've previewed something and you know this is what you want to use and then you want to use it in this app. But you could also Control Click it, two-finger click on the trackpad or right click on the mouse, and bring up the full list of apps that are compatible with that file type. So you can open it with a different app that way. 
Now when you're viewing a photo like this you can actually zoom in. If you've got a trackpad you can just take two fingers and pinch out or you could use the Command and then Plus or Minus keys. When you do this you can now use two fingers on the trackpad and then move around to see other parts to the image. If you have an Apple mouse you can just use one finger on the surface of that mouse to move around. 
Now if you use Quick Look with a video it will bring up the video and start playing it. You can pause and resume here. You can drag the playback head in the timeline as you like. There's even a set of controls here on the right to change playback speed. You can also use two-fingers on your trackpad to scrub left and right to get to any part of the video you like. It will work with one finger on the surface of the Apple mouse. 
You can actually make changes to some files using just Quick Look. So, for instance, for a photo you can go up here and you can see there is a Rotate button and I can rotate. If you hold the Option Key down it rotates the other way. You also have Markup Tools here. You can get to the full set of Markup Tools, just like in Preview, but you're not in Preview. You're just using Quick Look and you can draw on the image or add any of these other things. Markup Tools also work in pdf's. I can bring up the Markup Tools for that. In videos you can actually use the Trim tool here and trim the video, click Done, and now that's trimmed. I can save it as a new clip or replace the existing file. 
Of course with Quick Look you have the Share button here. It's the same Share Tools you can get to by selecting the file in the Finder. But sometimes it is handy to be able to access these right here from inside Quick Look if you've found the file that you want.  So you can AirDrop, create a new email message, send a text message with it in it. Add it to Photos. Add it to various other apps or initiate File Sharing if the file is in iCloud Drive. 
Now when you bring up a photo you just see the photo. There is nowhere else to navigate to. But other files do allow you to navigate. For instance in a Pages document, I'm at the beginning of the document here, but I can use two-fingers on my trackpad or one on my mouse and scroll through it. Other file types support this as well. Here's a Keynote presentation and I can scroll through the entire presentation. Here's a Word document and I can scroll through that. With Numbers it gets really interesting. Because not only can you scroll through in Numbers but you can select different sheets in the Numbers document. In pdf's you actually get the pages as thumbnails on the right side. So you can jump around to a page or you can just use scrolling here on the left.
Now when you're viewing a file that's actually made of text, like a pdf or Pages document or something, you can actually select text in the document. So you can click and select and you can Command C to Copy. So you can find some text in a Text document, in a pdf, Pages document, Word document and copy the text in Quick Look without ever having to open up the file in the actual app. 
Now you can also grab text from images. So you remember now that there is something called Live Text where you can grab text and images in apps like Photos and such. But you can do this with Quick Look as well. So I'm going to take this image, use Quick Look, and you can see there's some text here. I can actually select the text, Copy, and then I can Paste it into another app. I never had to open up the image in anything. I just used Quick Look.
You can also identify things in photos like for instance plants. So here I have a photo that's got a plant in it. Notice I get this little i button there with little sparkles to  the top left. Click on that and it's going to identify the plant. You could do this for landmarks as well. So here I can identify this image. 
Now so far we've looked at using Quick Look on files in the Finder. But you can actually use it in some other places as well. For instance in the Dock I can click on a folder on the right side of the dock, like say the Downloads folder. Now if I use the arrow keys to start navigating in this I can use Quick Look to get a preview of what's in there. Notice how it is even pointing to that image. I can use the arrow keys to continue to move around. If I change from Fan to Grid View I can do the same thing. So I'll use the arrow keys, not clicking, and then I could use the spacebar and bring up Quick Look. 
I can also use Quick Look in Notes. I can select this image here and if I use Spacebar it brings up the image in Quick Look which may make it a lot larger and easier to see and I can do all the other things as I talked about in it. If I have another document, like here's a Pages document, I can use the Spacebar with that as weill to get a preview of what is inside the document. Even select text inside the document using Quick Look from Notes.The same thing in Mail. I can select an image. Maybe it is too small here in Mail and use Quick Look to bring it up there and do anything else I want with the image in Quick Look.
Now Quick Look will work with all the standard files you can image like pdf's, text files, Pages files, Word documents, Images, Videos, all of that. But it won't work with other types of files. For instance, ePub files it won't work with. Text files with different extensions for programming languages it won't work with. Lots of third party apps it won't work with. However, you can have extensions to Quick Look to add those file types to it. If you go to System Preferences and then Extensions you could see Quick Look here. Now sometimes Quick Look extensions will be added as part of the app. I have Pixelmator Pro installed here. So I've got two options here for Pixelmator Pro files. Pixelmatory Pro files work great in Quick Look because I've got the app installed and these turned On. However, if I didn't have Pixelmator Pro then when I looked at those files I wouldn't see much except an icon. But you can also find apps in The App Store that will add more Quick Look definitions for different file types. These won't change how things like pdf's and text files look now. They can't replace that. But they can add other file types. You can get some of these from The App Store like this. There's also a website called Quick Look Plug-ins.com that will list these and other ones that you can download from websites instead of from The App Store that will add different file types to Quick Look. So you can extend it to include lots of different files types that aren't supported natively in macOS. 
So I hope you found this look at Quick Look useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 5 Responses to “17 Things You May Not Know About Quick Look”

2 years ago

I receive .docx files off and on and am curious if Quicklook is my best option OR use Save As... and delete the x in the filename??

Gary Rosenzweig

PW: Depends on what you are trying to do with them. For viewing, if Quick Look works and that is all you need, then stick with that. But if you need to edit them you can always open in TextEdit or Pages. Neither will be as perfect as just using Microsoft Word itself though. It depends on the document. Changing the .docx to .doc probably isn't something yo unshod do though as then someone else opening in Word may have trouble.

lauren eisen

gary, thank you for this as i learned so many things i didn't know you do with quick look.
however, when i went to my extensions, it wasn't showing up in the side bar and there were no options that i could see to add it. can you please tell me how to add quick look to the side bar so i may find other plug ins? thanks as always for another great tutorial!

Robert Bailey

Excellent information--I once shook my head over the number of people who didn't know anything about Quick Look, but after seeing this I realize I didn't know as much as I thought I did! I will be using the "Contact Sheet" feature all the time now.

Lauren: Perhaps it isn't there because you don't have any? You wouldn't add extensions in System Preferences. You would add some by going to the App Store and downloading an app that happened to have extensions. The System Preferences section is just for enabling and disabling them once you have them.

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17 Things You May Not Know About Quick Look

Comments: 5 Responses to “17 Things You May Not Know About Quick Look”

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