Quicklook is broken in Lion

Question

[Turns out this is known bug #9536151]

I have a strange issue with Quicklook in Lion. This is on a clean install and happens with more than one user. It also isn't fixed if I clean out the Quicklook cache in /var/folders

I have to push the spacebar twice to get Quicklook to work properly.

The first time the usual Quicklook 'window' appears but it is blank:

Blank Quicklook

Push the spacebar again and the image appears. If I restart the Finder the problem goes away briefly. It's driving me nuts.

Have you opened it in Preview.app to verify it's really a jpg? — nicerobot, Dec 11 '11 at 20:53
Is there a way to completely reset / regenerate QuickLook preferences (system-wide)? has an accepted answer that might help. — Graham Perrin, Nov 05 '12 at 10:22

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Dec 11 '11 at 18:06

This sounds like a bug; you can report it at bugreporter.apple.com with an Apple ID and password.

Can you reproduce the problem, then check for new error messages in /Applications/Utilities/Console.app? There's a small chance that this will indicate the source of the problem.

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Dec 11 '11 at 18:33

2

You might see a message in the console like this:

com.apple.quicklook.32bit[22808]): Job appears to have crashed: Abort trap: 6

You should file as bneely says.

Have you tried the usual stuff of repairing permissions, restarting etc.

Also, if you file a report, you should include your system.log (/var/log) and Apple System Profile report (About this Mac > More Info > System Report > save....)

answered Dec 11 '11 at 18:33

ICL1901

2,852

I'm not getting any messages in the logs at the moment. – Gazzer Dec 12 '11 at 15:56

score 0 · Answer 3 · edited Sep 10 '14 at 12:18

Some people recommended deleting your ~Library/Preferences/com.apple.finder.plist file to fix it. I wasn't able to simply delete the file to fix the problem. I had to go into my back up account and make a copy of the file from ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.finder.plist and then move it into my user account. I'm sure you could do the same thing with your Guest user account, too.

For me, the problem was caused by making the text in QuickLook copyable. I noticed when I turned on defaults write -g QLEnableTextSelection -bool true that the blank Quicklook bug was coming up as talked about in this thread. When I turned it off, (defaults write -g QLEnableTextSelection -bool false) the problem went away.

Quicklook is broken in Lion

3 Answers3