OSX QuickLook plugins

One moment my Mac can QL my camera raw files (NEF and CRW) and the next it cannot, just producing a grey area on the screen. Did a whole lot of googling to see whats going on. Didn't find anything other than suggestion to re-install the current update (10.6.8). A restart seemed a less time consuming option first, which happily fixed the problem.

While digging, I found that 3rd parties can write their own QL plugins, and there's even a site for them, www.quicklookplugins.com

Some plugins struck me as immediately useful such as:

whomwah.github.com/qlstephen to read the suffix-less README, INSTALL and CHANGELOG files you get with downloaded source code and some apps.

Here is it being used to QL the install instructions of itself. Your recursion dollars at work :-)

www.kainjow.com/?p=77 to QL AppleScripts

If you use InDesign, InCopy, ASE, PostScript, EPS, Illustrator & Quark then www.metadesignsolutions.com/products/mac-osx-quicklook-adoview.php will be useful, and the increase in productivity surely worth the $9.99

Photoshop brush viewer.

For GIS try people.oregonstate.edu/~jennyb/gislook/

For more free ones take a look here.

When you've installed the QL plugin, you may need to force a refresh of the QL databse.

In terminal you can run some QL related commands:

$ qlmanage -r

refreshes the QL databse

$ qlmanage -p file.crw 

generates a preview. Handy to see if QL has the right plugin.

$ qlmanage -h 

gives all its options

Usage: qlmanage [OPTIONS] path...
    -h        Display this help
    -r        Force reloading Generators list
    -r cache    Reset thumbnail disk cache
    -m [name ...]    Display statistics about quicklookd. Stats names:
            * plugins    Show the generators list
            * server    Show quicklookd life information
            * memory    Show quicklookd memory consumption
            * burst        Show statistics about the last burst
            * threads    Show concurrent accesses stats
            * other        Show other information about quicklookd
    -d debugLevel    Integer between 1-4
    -p        Compute previews of the documents
    -t        Compute thumbnails of the documents
    -x        Use quicklookd (remote computation)
    -i        Compute thumbnail in icon mode
    -s size        Size for the thumbnail
    -f factor    Scale factor for the thumbnail
    -z        Display generation performance info (don't display thumbnails)
    -o dir        Output result in dir (don't display thumbnails or previews)
    -c contentType    Force the content type used for the documents
    -g generator    Force the generator to use

or you can do

$man qlmanage

NAME
     qlmanage -- Quick Look Server debug and management tool

SYNOPSIS
     qlmanage -r

     qlmanage -m [name ...]

     qlmanage -t [-d debugLevel] [-x] [-i] [-s size] [-f factor] [-c contentTypeUTI [-g generator]] [file ...]

     qlmanage -p [-d debugLevel] [-x] [-c contentTypeUTI [-g generator]] [file ...]

     qlmanage -h

DESCRIPTION
     qlmanage allows you to test your Quick Look generators and manage Quick Look Server.

     The following usages are available:

     1.       qlmanage -r resets Quick Look Server and all Quick Look client's generator cache.

     2.       qlmanage -m gets all sort of information on Quick Look server including the list of detected generators.

     3.       qlmanage -t displays the Quick Look generated thumbnails (if available) for the specified files.

     4.       qlmanage -p displays the Quick Look generated previews for the specified files.

     5.       qlmanage -h displays extensive help.