Disable drawer thumbnails in Preview.app

Aug 23, '07 07:30:05AM

Contributed by: moonhawk

Here's the problem: I frequently view PDF files that consist of scanned images (e.g. archived articles from the pre-electronic publishing days). When I open these with Preview.app, the application appears to freeze for a while as it processes and generates thumbnail images for each page in the drawer. This process takes an especially long time for documents with numerous pages. A preference option in the app allows changing the size of the thumbnails, but does not allow disabling them completely.

Here's the solution:

  1. Quit Preview.app if open.
  2. Open ~/Library » Preferences » com.apple.Preview.plist with a plain text editor.
  3. Search for thumbnail; it should find the PVGeneralThumbnailSize key.
  4. Replace the integer right underneath (which varies depending on what you set your preferred thumbnail size to) to 0.
  5. Save the change made and close.
Now open Preview.app, and you'll see that the drawer will no longer show any thumbnails.

[robg adds: The plist file is stored as a binary, so editing it in a plain text editor probably won't work. If you have the Developer Tools installed, you can just double-click it. You could also use PlistEdit Pro or Pref Setter to edit the file. If you're Terminally-inclined, you can use the process described in this hint to convert the file from binary to text for editing, and then back to binary again when you're done.]

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