How to view Thumbnail Previews in Finder?

[mgo]

Hey there, is there any way to have Finder showing thumbnail previews? Except for the document preview thumbnail size I haven't found related settings and am seeing a Moho icon only.

I am on latest Moho, MacOS Ventura 13.2.1 (Apple M1).

[Greenlaw]

I think I read that not seeing a document thumbnail was an issue with the Mac version of Moho 13. I'm not sure this had been solved in the current Moho 13.5.5 but you can install it separately from Moho 13.2.1 to find out, and keep using 13.2.1 if you still need that version.

Regardless, you should update to 13.5.5 anyway because Lost Marble added many new features and improvements, and the old Smith Micro version of 13 was buggy and problematic. The Lost Marble 13.5.5 update is free to registered users of 13.x.

[SimplSam]

... I'm not sure this had been solved in the current Moho 13.5.5 but you can install it separately from Moho 13.2.1 to find out, and keep using 13.2.1 if you still need that version...

The referenced 13.2.1 is the MacOS version. Not Moho!

[synthsin75]

I haven't had thumbnail previews on Windows 10 in ages. If I install Moho 11 or 12 they come back, but as soon as I save the file with the latest version, all I get are icons.

[Greenlaw]

Yes, I mentioned in my post that it was the Mac version I was referring to. (Update: Oops! My bad...see next post.)

FWIW, I see thumbnails here in Moho 13.5.5 on Windows 11...



But TBH I had to check to be sure. Since this doesn't affect software performance or my ability to animate in Moho, I haven't paid much attention to it. (Also, I'm usually viewing files in Details view, not Icon.)

This does make me wonder why I'm seeing thumbnails but others are not though. Maybe it's an OS setting?

[Greenlaw]

The referenced 13.2.1 is the MacOS version. Not Moho!

Oops! Sorry guys, I completely mis-read yours and mgo's posts.

[hayasidist]

FWIW, thumbnails are working here, win 10, Moho 13.5.5.

also, I don't think the OS display of thumbnails is related to the edit / preferences / documents / preview thumbnail size - so it's likely not to be a moho _program_ / file one.

Which means it is probably an an OS-related issue: e.g. missing or corrupt (windows) .dll or something that is needed to create the thumbnail and that will have come from the moho installation files; or maybe (windows) a corrupt thumbnail cache.

But I know slightly less than SFA about Macs, so that's about as much help as I can be with the specific problem.

[slowtiger]

Since Mac OS 10.11 / Moho 11.5:

In list view you only see previews if you choose "large icons", with "small icons" you only see the generic Moho logo icon. In all other views you'll see the preview.

[mgo]

On Macs, inside the home directory is a folder called Library/QuickLook. This is apparently the place where Quicklook preview generators (and I assume thumbnail generators) go - at least there is a file called

MohoQuickLookPlugin.qlgenerator

which, unfortunately, is Zero bytes big.

Could any mac users see and check if this file is there? Also, if it is bigger than zero bytes, do thumbnail previews (and quicklook) worj for You?

Is there a reliable to way to bring this to the attention to developers? The zero bytes file could be an oversight that maybe can be easily be fixed. And that would help a lot.

[mgo]

Never mind my last quesiton, I found the URL to submit a bug.

[SimplSam]

Prompted by this thread and a previous one

I think with version 13 Moho stopped creating QuickLook previews for files on macOS. ...

I just installed 12.5 (final via https://my.smithmicro.com/) on the same Mac system and Bingo - Moho thumbnails are working.

I then had to move Moho 13.5 out of Bin back to Applications, and Re-associate Moho 13.5 as the default .moho app via File > Get Info > Open with: ... Change All

[Lukas]

I just installed 12.5 (final via https://my.smithmicro.com/) on the same Mac system and Bingo - Moho thumbnails are working.

WHAT...

Thanks! Happy to have the thumbnails back!

I remember having thumbnails with the current Moho version at some point, and was confused when I realised they were gone (guess after moving to a fresh system/install) and thought it was some user error... But apparently it was just working because of some lingering 12.5 files!? And Moho 13 doesn't install the necessary files.

(On macOS 11.6 fwiw)

[mgo]

SimplsSam You gave me the last hint I needed to resolve this. I managed to bring back thumbnail previews, with a little time spent in the macOS Terminal.

1) I downloaded the latest Moho 12.5 from the link above
2) The .pkg won't "Show contents" but can be expanded with "pkgutil -- expand Moho-12.5.1-Mac.pkg moho". This extracted the contents into a folder called "moho". I could only open it from Terminal with "open moho", because it refused to show up in Finder. Maybe just my system, dunno.
3) Inside is a file called "MohoInternal.pkg", which "Shows contents" from the context menu
4) Inside is a file called Payload. It can be opened, e.g. extracted with Archive Utility.
5) The result is the program itself, Moho. Once again, "Show Package Contents" to go down a little further
6) Inside Contents/Library/Quicklook/ is the file I needed; MohoQuickLookPlugin.qlgenerator

I copied this file to <user>/Library/Quicklook (after removing the broken one that Moho 13.5. installs)

My thumbnails are back The aspect ratio is .. funny, probably because plugin isn't smart enough to work with square artworks, but this is a lot better than no thumbnails at all.

I went the extra mile because I wasn't sure which files the installation of 12.5. would have replaced with older versions. Thanks everyone for the replies!

[SimplSam]

That sounds like a cool solution - which hits a nail on the head, and lead me down another path because my ~/Library/Quicklook/MohoQuickLookPlugin.qlgenerator did not change after the 12.5 install, and I removed it all together and rebooted and thumbnails still worked!

So after some more investigations - I found the command: qlmanage as I wanted to clear any cached settings (qlmanage -r, qlmanage -r cache) and then saw qlmanage -m (or qlmanage -m plugins) to list the plugins, and ran ...

qlmanage -m | grep -i moho

and got:

com.smithmicro.anime -> /Applications/Moho.app/Contents/Library/QuickLook/MohoQuickLookPlugin.qlgenerator (1.0 - loaded)
com.smithmicro.animestyles -> /Applications/Moho.app/Contents/Library/QuickLook/MohoQuickLookPlugin.qlgenerator (1.0 - loaded)
com.smithmicro.moho -> /Applications/Moho.app/Contents/Library/QuickLook/MohoQuickLookPlugin.qlgenerator (1.0 - loaded)
com.smithmicro.mohotyles -> /Applications/Moho.app/Contents/Library/QuickLook/MohoQuickLookPlugin.qlgenerator (1.0 - loaded)
com.smithmicro.anme -> /Applications/Moho.app/Contents/Library/QuickLook/MohoQuickLookPlugin.qlgenerator (1.0 - loaded)

Note: /Applications/Moho.app is the Moho 13.5 path. It would be interesting to see what the results of the command are on a non-thumbnail-working 13.5 system, or if the /Applications/Moho.app/Contents/Library/QuickLook/ dir even exists.

[mgo]

Cool thanks. Keeping this one for reference. How macOS handles previews has been a total mystery until now, and I never bothered. This digging sheds a little light.