Previewing Images With the Quick Look Index Sheet

Hi, this is Gary at MacMost.com.  Let me show you the best way to quickly preview a bunch of images on your Mac to find the right one.

So let's say you have bunch of images as files in the Finder and you need to find the right one. So you want to preview all the images very quickly and identify the right one so you can use it. Well, if you're just in the Finder, like this, you may have a hard time doing that. The icons to the left in the List View and other views are very small. It is hard to see them there. If you switch to Icon View it is a little harder to move around in this two-dimensional view here and the icons are still pretty small. You can go to View, Show View Options and increase the icon size, but that makes it sometimes even harder to get around in the Finder. Another option is to use Gallery View where you can see one image at a time in kind of a list of images at the bottom. Another method is in either List View or Column View is to go to View and Show Preview. This shows the Preview Pane here on the right. You can even make it a little bit bigger and then you can get a bigger preview of what you see here. There are other methods as well. 

But what sometimes works best to be able to see all the images at once and you can do that using a little known function of Quick Look. Now Quick Look gives you the ability to select an image, and then press the Spacebar, and then you get a good view of this one image here. You can select another image with Quick Look still open and it will change to that image. As a matter of fact you can even use the arrow keys to go down this list and quickly go through all the images to find the one you want. But what will be more useful is if you can see all the images at once. You can!

The first step is to select the images you want. So you can select one and then shift click to select more and Arrange, Command click to Add more or Remove more from the ones you want to preview, or just simply use Command A to select All of the files in the current folder. Once you have more than one file selected if you bring up Quick Look it first looks about the same. But if you notice the top here you've got little arrows and you can use these to move through all of the images. It still only gets you one at a time. You can use the arrow keys to do this but still just one at a time.

However, if you look over here you'll see this button. This gives you the Index Sheet, which is what we want. Click that and you get to see large thumbnails of all of the selected images. So this isn't all the images in the folder. This is the ones you have selected before you activated Quick Look. So you see all of these and if you want to get a closer look at one you can simply click it and it will bring it into the full size of the Quick Look window. You can click here to go back to the Index Sheet and then look at yet another one. So it is a quick way to view what's there. 

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The size of these images depends on how many files you have selected. So, for instance, if I select just, say, four of these like that and I bring it up you can see here I get pretty big ones. But if I select all of these and then I use the Spacebar to bring up Quick Look you can see it goes to about five across here. Then I have to scroll. Which isn't too bad. You still get a pretty quick overview of all of your images.

Now also note when you're looking at one here you've got the ability to go full screen with Quick Look. Here you've got arrow keys. You even have a Play button to start a slideshow. You also have the Index Sheet button here. Now you've got the Index Sheet but now it fills your screen with a nice black background. You can still click on one to go to it and then use the Index Sheet button here to go back to the Index Sheet. 

Now if you want to stay away from the mouse and trackpad and just use the keyboard you can. So one thing to make sure you do is don't have the pointer over an individual image. If you do every time you go to the Index Sheet it's going to go and select that image. So put the pointer somewhere in-between images. Now you can use the arrow keys to move around. If you use Return you can view that individual image. If you want to get back to the Index Sheet use Command and Return. As a matter of fact Command and Return works to get you into the Index Sheet in the first place as well. So now notice if I go down to say this image here, Return, and then Command Return to go back it doesn't show anything selected. But that same image is, in fact, selected. If I go to the left you can see how it goes to the one to the left. So I can go through all of these images and find the one I want pretty easily. If I want to Exit full screen all I need to do is be viewing an individual image, like that, and then click here. Now I'm back to this view where the same keyboard shortcuts work. I can do Command Return, get the Index Sheet. I can go down to an image that I want, Return to go into it, Command Return to go back, and so on. You can always use Spacebar to Dismiss the  Quick Look window or you can use the Escape Key. That works as well. 

Also, if you want to go direct to Full Screen mode use Option Space. This will go direct to Full Screen Mode but it also starts the slideshow playing. So you can just use the spacebar to stop the slideshow. You can see the Play and Pause button there. Or with the slideshow playing if you do Command Return to go into the Index Sheet, of course, the slideshow stops. 

Now what do you do once you find the image? That's a little tricky because if you bring up Quick Look, I'll do Command Return to get the Index Sheet. I'll just use keyboard shortcuts to view the images and then I'll find, say, the one that I want. Like this one. Well, it is kind of hard to figure out which file that is because if you dismiss Quick Look at this point it doesn't show you which one is the current one that you're looking at. So, if you want to do something with this image your choices are to use this button here at the top right which will open up the image in the default app. You can also use the Share button here to various things with it. You can Control Click, two-finger click on a trackpad or right click on a mouse and do things here like, for instance, Copy the image or if there is a subject in it you can Copy the subject as well. Or you can simply note which file it is, you can see it here at the top. So once you Return here to just the regular Finder View you can now select it. 

So if you work with lots of image files it is useful to know about this Index Sheet function inside of Quick Look. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.