PSB Quick Look

⚠️PSB Quick Look doesn’t work with Mac OS 15 (Sequoia), due to Apple deprecating the old Quick Look plugin interface. Unfortunately, I can’t justify rewriting PSB Quick Look for the new interface. Please do not purchase the plugin for Mac OS 15 or later (no refunds).

It’s disappointing that in the last ten years, Adobe hasn’t cared to implement my proposal for storing larger-sized previews in PSBs, which Mac Finder and Windows Explorer could use to provide instant previews at very low engineering cost.

PSB Quick Look provides fast previews and thumbnails for Photoshop PSB and PSD files in the Mac Finder and file open/save dialogs. Features:

• PSB files of arbitrary size
• Fast—10-gigabyte files preview in just a second or two
• Twenty times faster than Finder’s default Quick Look previews and thumbnails for very large files

With higher-resolution cameras, panoramas, HDR, and sophisticated multi-layer editing, more and more Photoshop users are adopting the PSB file format. While PSD files are limited to a maximum of 30K x 30K pixels and a total of 2 gigabytes, PSB files can be as large as 300K x 300K pixels, with no limit on total byte size.

If you’re on Mac OS 10.14 (Mojave) or earlier, PSB Quick Look is required for Finder to display PSB previews and thumbnails. Mac OS 10.15 (Catalina) does provide PSB previews and thumbnails, but it’s very slow on large files, taking 20 seconds or more per file. PSB Quick Look is twenty times faster, with both PSBs and PSDs.

Try it for free for 30 days. Buy it for $9.95.

Download and Install

⚠️PSB Quick Look doesn’t work with Mac OS 15 (Sequoia), due to Apple deprecating the old Quick Look plugin interface. Unfortunately, I can’t justify rewriting PSB Quick Look for the new interface. Please do not purchase the plugin for Mac OS 15 or later (no refunds).

PSB Quick Look requires Mac OS 10.9 (Mavericks) or later. To install:

1. Download the free trial from PSB Quick Look Trial.1.14.pkg. If you are upgrading to the paid version, click the download link in the purchase-confirmation email.
2. In the Finder, navigate to where you downloaded the file and double-click it to run the installer.

The free trial is for 30 days—after that, you’ll need the paid version.

Buy PSB Quick Look

⚠️PSB Quick Look doesn’t work with Mac OS 15 (Sequoia), due to Apple deprecating the old Quick Look plugin interface. Unfortunately, I can’t justify rewriting PSB Quick Look for the new interface. Please do not purchase the plugin for Mac OS 15 or later (no refunds).

1. Buy PSB Quick Look for $9.95:  
   
   The price includes unlimited upgrades. Make sure you’re satisfied with the free trial before buying.
2. After purchasing, you will receive an email with a download link to the paid version..
3. Click the download link in the email.
4. In the Finder, navigate to where you downloaded the file and double-click it to run the installer.

Uninstall

To uninstall PSB Quick Look and revert to the built-in Mac OS thumbnails and previews:

1. In the Finder do Go > Go To Folder and enter /Library/QuickLook. 
2. Delete the package PSB Quick Look.qlgenerator.
3. Restart your computer.

Using PSB Quick Look

Make sure your files are saved with these Photoshop options in Preferences > File Handling:

• Image Previews: Always Save
• Thumbnail
• Maximize PSD and PSB File Compatibility

Note that there is a long-standing bug in Photoshop—if a file is saved without Maximize … Compatibility, setting Maximize … Compatibility and resaving the file will have no effect.  You’ll need to do File > Save As to save a copy of the file. (Adobe acknowledged this bug many years ago but hasn’t fixed it.)

If you choose not to save a file with Maximize … Compatibility (which may increase its size a fair bit if it has layers), then the larger thumbnail sizes and the preview will be low-resolution and pixelated, but at least you’ll get an idea of what’s in the file. The pixilation is a limitation of Photoshop, which only stores a very small 160 x 160 pixel thumbnail in the file.

PSB Quick Look provides thumbnails and previews for PSD files as well as PSBs. The PSD previews built-in to Mac OS are very slow for larger PSDs (e.g. hundreds of megabytes), and PSB Quick Look is up to twenty times faster.

Support

Please send problems, bugs, suggestions, and feedback to ellis-lightroom@johnrellis.com.

⚠️PSB Quick Look doesn’t work with Mac OS 15 (Sequoia), due to Apple deprecating the old Quick Look plugin interface. Unfortunately, I can’t justify rewriting PSB Quick Look for the new interface. Please do not purchase the plugin for Mac OS 15 or later (no refunds).

I’ll gladly provide free licenses in exchange for reports of new, reproducible bugs.

If you contact me about a problem, please include your version of Mac OS and Photoshop. Upload the PSB or PSD causing the problem to Dropbox or similar service and include the link in your email.

Known limitations and issues:

• When the 30-day free trial expires, thumbnails and previews of PSDs and PSBs will be replaced with an “expired” message. If you don’t wish to purchase PSB Quick Look, uninstall it and the default thumbnails and previews provided by Mac OS will be restored.
• If you’ve just installed PSB Quick Look on an Apple Silicon Mac or you’ve migrated from an Intel to Apple Silicon Mac, and PSB Quick Look doesn’t appear to work, ensure you’ve got Apple’s Rosetta 2 installed (which allows older software to run).
• PSB Quick Look does not run on Mac OS 10.8 (Mountain Lion) or earlier.
• Thumbnails and previews for files saved without Photoshop’s Maximize Compatibility option will appear very pixelated at larger sizes. This happens because Photoshop stores only a tiny 160×160 JPEG thumbnail in the file. Previous versions stored higher-resolution JPEG previews, but Adobe removed that functionality in recent versions. I have made a proposal to Adobe to increase the size of the stored thumbnail, which would eliminate the need to use the Maximize Compatibility option to get higher-resolution thumbnails and previews.
• For some images, the thumbnails and previews may appear over-sharpened or noisy. This is a consequence of PSB Quick Look’s fast resize algorithm, which minimizes the amount of data that must be read from very large PSBs.
• Sometimes Finder displays generic icons or fuzzy thumbnails, especially on folders with large numbers of PSB/PSD files and folders stored on slower drives (e.g. portable external drives and network drives). To work around this Finder/Quick Look bug, use the Finder’s View > Show View Options command to set the icon size to the smallest size, and then increment the size slowly, waiting each time until Finder finishes refreshing the folder’s thumbnails. If this happens annoyingly often, setting the icon size to less than about 200 x 200 will avoid the problem.
  
  The underlying cause is that the Finder/Quick Look gives up too quickly if a thumbnail isn’t generated within about 20 seconds. While PSB Quick Look normally generates a thumbnail in no more than a few seconds, even for files of many gigabytes, there are times when it takes longer than 20 seconds for reasons out of its control: the Finder has a bug causing it to request the same thumbnail multiple times (see below); even the best network volumes can sometimes hiccup and be slow to respond; external disks may be configured to automatically spin down when idle and can take many seconds to spin back up; there may be other processes accessing the disk. Once Finder/Quick Look sees that a thumbnail took longer than 20 seconds, it won’t try to regenerate it again until you kick the Finder by changing the icon size, forcing it to regenerate all thumbnails.
• The Finder in Mac OS 10.9 (Mavericks) ignores the display profile when showing thumbnails in a folder window, though it obeys the display profile for thumbnails on the desktop. So colors of thumbnails may be somewhat off. This is fixed in Mac OS 10.10 (Yosemite).
• For the ability to see previews and thumbnails of PSD and PSB files on Windows, see Ardfry Imaging.

Version History