Way, Way OT. Kinda. Finder won't show thumbnails, and Preview ain't available...

[jdos2]

My Mac has trouble, and I can't find the answer anywhere. I don't wanna reinstall OS X.

My "preview pane" in the Finder has quit working. I noticed it the other day after installing the S3 software (Fuji S3, that is) and now "Preview" isn't even listed in the "Open With" menu item! Preview still opens things fine, but I've gotta start it first by hand, or "Choose Application" and then select "ALL Applications" or else it's greyed out.

My Finder won't show thumbnails.

It's not critical, in that I can still work. Preview's "Open" pane still DOES show previews, but I'd rather have 'em in the finder for quick drag-and-post operation without having to remember file names.

Ideas, please?

 

[jlw]

The previews you see in the Finder aren't anything to do with the Preview application, but the fact that both of them stopped working after you installed a piece of software (Fuji S3) suggests that the installer might have clobbered the "application bindings" that tell the Finder what application to use to open what kind of document.

I could suggest several fairly hairy fixes involving the command line, but since I'm not sure exactly what the problem is, I'll stick with a couple of simple and reasonably safe ones:

-- Launch Disk Utility and run the Repair Permissions option on your hard disk.

-- Spend $15 on a downloadable shareware utility called Cocktail, which automates several kinds of maintenance operations. It has several sections with different functions, some of them pretty esoteric, but an easy way to use it is just to run the "Pilot" option. This performs all your Mac's scheduled maintenance operations in one pass; then you restart, which forces the OS to rebuild various caches, bindings, etc., with clean new information.

Needless to say, you should make sure you have a backup of all your important data before you do ANY type of maintenance. There's less than a one-in-a-thousand chance of something getting screwed up... but if it happens to be your unlucky day, having a backup makes it a lot easier to take!