OSX 10.6 Thumbnail distortion in Finder

[Sawday]

When using the thumbnail option to look at folders of photos, I'm finding that since my recent update to Snow Leopard that many of my thumbnails are being corrupted in one of two ways. In some folders the thumbnail is displayed as a square image with the actual image distorted to fit (ie stretched in one direction or the other), in others only part of the image is displayed, magnified and rotated by 90 degrees. Most folders are OK apart from those that show thumbnails overlapping - alluded to in another posting here.

Anyone else seen these? Presumably a fix is on the way but if not how do I report these to Apple?

 

[oposky2006]

Since I haven't heard of this elsewhere, it's possible that it's a software problem on your machine. Have you tried:

1. checking for damaged system and user prefs?
2. checking permissions? (unlikely, but possible)
3. rebuilding LaunchSevices?
4. updating the dydld's shared cache?
5. cleaning the various user, internet and system caches?

 

[Sawday]

I'll try Onyx for most of these but can you tell me how to rebuild Launch Services (and tell me what they are!) and also I don't know that dydld's shard cache is - is there a typo here. Thanks.

 

[oposky2006]

I'll try Onyx for most of these but can you tell me how to rebuild Launch Services (and tell me what they are!) and also I don't know that dydld's shard cache is - is there a typo here. Thanks.

You're right, there was a typo: dyld's shared cache. It's explained in Onyx. If you don't understand what Onyx says, you probably won't understand my tech explanation either. But it's a completely safe operation, and will not harm your system. It sort of makes sure that everything knows where everything is.

Launch services is on the same tab as the dyld's shared cache operation, directly above the cache operation. It's also completely safe. It links (or re-links) documents to apps, and eliminates duplicate links (for example, if you do an "Open with..." and you see the same app twice, it'll get rid of that).

In both cases, it's a good idea to not do anything else while the software is working. It shouldn't take more than a minute or two to finish.