How To Use Mac Quick Look In 5 Minutes

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Here's everything you need to know about using Quick Look on your Mac in 5 minutes.

Quick Look is a built-in system utility that allows you to preview files before you open them. You can be in any Finder View, like Icon View here or say List View. You can select a file and then press the Spacebar and what you get is Quick Look, this window here that shows you the file. You can move this window around. You can stretch it like any other window. To Dismiss it you can click the X here or just press the Spacebar again.

The options you have in Quick Look depend on the file you've chosen. For instance, for the video file here I've got Playback controls at the bottom. For this Pages document here I'll see some of the text and I can scroll through all the pages. For this Numbers Spreadsheet here I can even browse through the different sheets. When you bring up Quick Look it's the file in the Finder that is still selected. So you can still access all of the Finder menu commands and keyboard shortcuts here to, say, Open the file or do something else with it even while viewing it in Quick Look. You can even use the Down Arrow to go to the next image here in the Finder which then would update the Quick Look window to show that image. So you can flip through the images in a folder very quickly, or you can simply click to select the image there in the Finder and the Quick Look window will update. 

You can also use Quick Look with folders. Select a folder, press the Spacebar to bring up Quick Look, and it will give you the total file size and count for all the files in that folder. For all standard Mac Apps and standard file types Quick Look knows how to display them. For third party apps the app itself needs to include a definition for macOS to be able to show a Preview of the file in Quick Look. Sometimes apps do it, sometimes they don't. Sometimes apps save files that are standard format anyway, or parts of the file that's saved include a standard preview, like perhaps an image that Quick Look can then show you. But you will occasionally run across files that can't be displayed in Quick Look and then you just get a generic icon and some file information. 

You also get some different options depending upon the file type. So, for instance, with this image selected here I can bring up Quick Look and notice that I can use this button here to rotate the image 90 degrees. With this video file here you can see I've got trimming tools and I can trim the video file right here in Quick Look. With word processing documents or text files I can actually select the text inside. So, I can copy text out of a document without ever even opening the document up. With both PDF and Image Files you can use the Markup Tools with this button and then you can markup the image, adding lines, arrows, and text as you like without even needing to open it up in an app like Preview. 

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Now if you have multiple images selected and you bring up Quick Look notice you get arrows here at the top and you can flip through your images. You can use the right and left arrow keys to do this as well. You can also click this Index Page button here and then see all the images like this. You can jump into one to see it and then return to the index page like that. You can also view one or more images in Full Screen Mode by brining up Quick Look and then clicking on this button here and you'll just view the whole image. You can return it to the normal window, like that. You can also jump directly to that with the Option Key. So Option, Space brings up Quick Look full screen. If you select multiple images Option Space will bring up all of those images full screen and you can flip through them with a little interface down here or go to the Index Sheet. 

You can use Quick Look in more places than just the Finder. For instance I can bring up Spotlight here and I can use the Arrow Keys to select a file, like this. I can use Spacebar here to bring up Quick Look for that file. So it works there in Spotlight. It works in Finder Searches as well. It even works in File Open Dialogues. Here I am in Pages, for instance, I go to File Open and I can select a file and before I decide to open it I can press the Spacebar and use Quick Look right here to preview that file. 

Get to know Quick Look as it is one of the most powerful productivity tools on your Mac. Thanks for watching.