Seeing photo thumbnails on covers of folders?

I do a lot of graphic work and have an external 1.5TB harddrive, on which I have probably close too 1 million pictures--far too many for my MacBook Pro's harddrive, but perfect for an external.

Unfortunately, I can't tell what's in each folder since a preview of the pictures does not appear on the folders when they're viewed at largest, as they would on a PC. This helps me greatly with my work and I'd like to know how to do it.

Also, I've noticed the CoverFlow option on my iPod shows the covers of some albums... This would do just fine. How can I get something like that for the folders on my external harddrive?

Wait. You can recognize what is in a folder by seeing a preview of one picture on the folder's icon? (seeing more than one would make them too small for me, and if you have more that two in each folder, I suspect for anyone else as well) And you can't give the folders names that will identify what is in them?

I don't know of a way to do what you want (assuming I'm understanding that correctly) within the OS. I wonder if there's a third-party application that will do that. Try a web search on "file icon on folder, Macintosh" or something like that.

Seeing just one would be great... Like I said with iTunes, the album cover is often available, and I'd be happy to go through my folders and pick a single photo which sums up the album for easy reference of the colours etc. included in the photos there.

Names really wouldn't help because of the enormous volume of stuff I have. I'd really like a picture, just like an album cover.

Download Onyx. Make sure you download the version appropriate to your OS version. There's an option to check in : Parameters>Finder "show the folder content previews in quick look". So now when you highlight a folder, and hit the space bar you'll see the content within that folder as an pic icon. And even better, is that it will continue to cycle through the content as well. Look at my screen shots.

But I have to ask you... Why on EARTH, with as many photos as you claim to have on your external HD, are you using Finder to view photos or preview them ? Why are you not using something like say... Adobe Bridge at the very least ? It's not data base driven, it's a file browser and will plow through your photos for you to reference in a jiffy ! Or why not Lightroom or Aperture or even Google's Picasa ?! Any of those options would be better than not using anything...

Doug

Doug b said:

Download Onyx. Make sure you download the version appropriate to your OS version. There's an option to check in : Parameters>Finder "show the folder content previews in quick look".

Click to expand...

I don't have that where you "pointed" to in Onyx 2.0.6 (Mac OS 10.5.8) but it looks really cool!

It is called XRay and I think it is only available in Leopard/Snow Leopard.
See folder content previews in Quick Look in 10.5 and 10.6 - Mac OS X Hints
You can try to enable it through commandline as well.

Still not as good as Window's folder preview.

You could try to generate your own icons - but with as many folders as you have this is proabably a PITA.
How To: Create Custom Icons for your Mac | MacApper

I've been using Adobe Bridge (for most pics) Lightroom(for DNG) and Picassa to manage my photos. Here is an article on how to use Picassa's facial recognition in conjunction with Lightroom.
CreativeTechs Tips Add Face Recognition to Lightroom w/ Picasa!

Hopefully somebody has some better info because I've been looking for something similar to windows. There was a request in Pathfinder for this but I cannot find it and it didn't have very many votes.

Cheers for the advice! Doug b, that worked great... Thanks for telling me about Onyx and posting the screenshots.

I hate to be blatant, but you really, really, REALLY need a better photo manager than the Finder.

There are a number of options out there; you should investigate them and choose one. If I may be so bold as to suggest, my sig contains info on one such option -- but all the various photo-management apps for the Mac are very good, depending on your particular situation.