Picture thumbnail not showing up with icon preview

Ok, so this is something that has been happening quite often for me. Throughout my computer, all of my jpg files haven't been showing up with "icon preview". They just show up as a piece of paper with 2 pictures and a loupe (that magnifying glass thing) with Jpeg in grey. Here's a screen shot.


So what could be the issue? I'm on a late 2008 macbook pro running OSX Version 10.5.8 if that matters.

I'm guessing that you have the icon preview checked in the finder view options.

What OS version are you running?

Yes, I have that checked. And the OS version is 10.5.8 I think.

If you got to about this mac in the apple menu, it will tell you if it's 10.5.8
Before messing around with preferences files in the user library, or relaunching finder, I would run repair disk permissions, and then reboot the mac, and see if it has fixed the problem.
If not, I would download the 10.5.8 combo update.
Mac OS X 10.5.8 Combo Update
Combo updates often fix up little bugs (even those that are not listed in the update info).

Ok then yeah, its 10.5.8. I feel stupid, but how exactly do I run a repair disk permissions? I googled it, and the process seemed a bit convoluted.

2ways to get there:
1: click desktop>click go in finder menu>utilities>disk utility or
2: applications>utilities>disk utility
When you are there, click on second HD in the left column, and click repair permissions.


... I would also download the combo update Mac OS X 10.5.8 Combo Update as mentioned in my previous post.

Oh! It worked! Thanks! I'm gonna still download the update, but the repair disk permissions thing did the trick.

And the naysayers report that repair permissions does nothing- hah, I say.

bobtomay said:

And the naysayers report that repair permissions does nothing- hah, I say.

Click to expand...

I second that

Great to hear!

Hey, sorry to bump up such an old thread, but I didn't want to make a new one for the same issue. Repairing disk permissions fixes the problem, but the problem tends to come back within a few weeks after doing so. I feel like having to constantly repair disk permissions seems like something else must be wrong. Its frustrating, because certain jpgs show up (if I saved them in photoshop) but other ones just still show up with the same generic jpeg icon. Any ideas on how to fix this?

Sorry to get back so late with a reply.... Just remembered this thread while assisting someone with a similar issue.
If you haven't fixed it already, sounds like time to reformat your HD if software updates haven't cleared up the issue,

Sorry to get back even later with a reply, but I've gotten so used to the problem that I forgot about it, until I realized I have a bunch of "anonymous" jpgs all over my desktop. But if I reformat my HD, would I still be able to keep my backups from time machine? I want to be able to keep all of my documents and stuff intact, so how would I do this using time machine?

Another solution

I actually looked EVERYWHERE, tons of forums all over the place, to try and figure out this problem, which seemed to randomly come up.

I am a programmer, and one day a while back to clear out some cache, I DELETED /tmp, the whole folder, instead of everything in it.

/tmp is commonly used by various system processes and applications to store temporary stuff (hence tmp).

The system COULD NOT RECREATE the folder, so my system, lacking it, just ran fine without being able to save temporary cache.

CREATING /tmp IMMEDIATELY FIXED THE PROBLEM. Since system processes are polling this folder constantly, including the one which generates caches for preview thumbnails in the finder, everything magically showed up instantly.

Other symptoms which indicate this folder may be LOCKED or MISSING:

Spotlight previews actually crash the Spotlight process when searching for things on your computer (something I do constantly).

Opening get info for a file which has some sort of image preview crashes the finder, and the preview in the get info window is showing because the last time you opened get info you clicked that arrow to see it. Consequently you can't click the arrow to hide the preview in the get info window because the finder crashes before you can.

Some applications actually have some errors when the startup, and applications with exceptional error handling (Textmate, it's how I figured this out) will complain that something in /tmp is missing.