How to Use Quick Look on Mac (and the Plugins Worth Installing)

The single most underused shortcut on a Mac is the Space bar. Select a file in Finder, press Space, and a preview window appears. No double-click, no app launch, no waiting for Photoshop to spin up just to glance at an image. Quick Look has been around since Leopard in 2007 and somehow most people still don’t use it.

It’s faster than opening anything. It works for almost every common file type. And with a handful of free plugins, you can extend it to preview file types Apple never bothered to support.

The basics

Select a file in Finder (single click — don’t open it). Press Space. A preview window opens.

What you see depends on the file type:

• Image: the image, with file info
• PDF: scrollable, multi-page preview
• Video: playable preview with scrubber
• Audio: playable with waveform
• Text: readable contents
• Folder: count of items inside

To close: press Space again, or Esc, or click outside the preview.

That’s it. That’s the move. Most people never go past this — but a few extra tricks make Quick Look genuinely powerful.

Multi-file Quick Look

Select multiple files (Cmd-click or shift-click), then press Space. Quick Look shows the first one with arrow buttons to flip through the rest. Or press Option+Space to open in a contact-sheet grid view of all selected files.

This is brutal for cleaning up a Downloads folder. Select 30 files, hit Option+Space, see them all in a grid, and pick what to keep without opening anything.

Full-screen Quick Look

Press Option+Space instead of Space and Quick Look opens full-screen. Great for actually reading a PDF or studying an image without the rest of the desktop competing for attention.

You can also press the diagonal-arrow icon in the top-left of any Quick Look window to expand to full-screen.

Esc exits full-screen and closes the preview.

What you can do inside a preview

Quick Look isn’t read-only. Depending on the file type, you can:

• PDFs: rotate pages, mark up with annotations, sign documents (click the markup icon in the toolbar)
• Images: rotate, crop, mark up, add text or shapes
• Videos: trim and save (click Markup or the trim controls in the toolbar)

The Markup tools are the same as in Preview. Anything you’d do there, you can do here without ever opening Preview proper.

For text and code files, Quick Look is read-only — but it’s still useful for verifying contents before opening in a heavier editor.

Quick Look plugins

This is where Quick Look becomes essential. Apple’s defaults cover the basics; community plugins fill in the gaps.

A few that are worth installing if you do any technical work:

• QLColorCode — syntax-highlighted previews for source code (Python, Swift, JavaScript, Ruby, etc.)
• QLStephen — preview plain-text files without extensions (README, .gitignore, etc.)
• QLMarkdown — render Markdown files instead of showing raw text
• Suspicious Package — preview the contents of .pkg installers before installing
• QuickLookJSON — formatted, collapsible JSON previews
• QLImageSize — show image dimensions and file size in the preview title bar
• WebPViewer — preview WebP images (macOS now supports this natively in some versions, but the plugin handles edge cases)

Most of these come from the QuicklookPlugins community on GitHub. They install to ~/Library/QuickLook/ and you may need to run qlmanage -r in Terminal to refresh after installing.

Installing a plugin

Most plugins ship as a .qlgenerator file. To install:

1. Download the plugin
2. Move the .qlgenerator file to ~/Library/QuickLook/ (create the folder if it doesn’t exist)
3. Open Terminal and run qlmanage -r to reset the Quick Look cache
4. Test by selecting a file the plugin should handle and pressing Space

If macOS blocks the plugin because it’s not signed, right-click the file → Open With → QuickLook (or open System Settings → Privacy & Security and approve it from there).

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Quick Look from the Open dialog

This one almost nobody knows. In any app’s Open dialog (the file picker), you can select a file and press Space for a Quick Look preview before opening. Useful when you’re about to attach something to an email and want to confirm it’s the right version.

Same in Save dialogs when navigating around to find the right folder.

Quick Look from Spotlight

After running a Spotlight search (Cmd+Space), select a result with arrow keys and press Space. The preview opens without leaving Spotlight. You can keep arrowing through results, previewing each one, until you find what you want — then Cmd+Return to reveal in Finder or just Return to open.

This pattern is how you find files faster than anyone else: Spotlight to search, arrow + Space to preview, Return when you’ve got the right one.

Quick Look in Finder column view

In Finder column view (Cmd+3 to switch), the rightmost column already shows a small preview of the selected file. But it’s tiny — pressing Space gives you the full preview while keeping the column structure intact.

This combo (column view + Space bar previews) is a power-user Finder workflow. You navigate hierarchies fast in column view and get full previews without breaking your flow.

When Quick Look stops working

A few common breakages:

Previews are blank or stuck on a loading spinner. The cache is corrupted. Open Terminal:

qlmanage -r
qlmanage -r cache

The first resets the plugin registry; the second nukes cached previews. Restart Finder with killall Finder and try again.

A specific file type stopped previewing. Could be a plugin conflict. Move plugins out of ~/Library/QuickLook/ one by one to find the culprit.

Space bar doesn’t open Quick Look. Make sure Finder is in the foreground and you’ve actually selected a file (single click, not double). If it still doesn’t work, try Cmd+Y instead — same effect, different shortcut.

Quick Look is slow. It pulls metadata from the file, so very large files (multi-GB videos, huge PSDs) take a moment to preview. Also, a near-full disk slows Quick Look noticeably along with everything else macOS does.

Quick Look for power Finder users

The fastest way to triage a folder of mixed files:

1. Open the folder in Finder
2. Cmd+A to select all
3. Option+Space for the contact sheet view
4. Use arrow keys to highlight files; press Cmd+Delete to trash any junk
5. Esc when done

Beats opening files one at a time, every time.

Quick Look isn’t a feature you optimize for — it’s a habit. The Space bar should be one of the most-pressed keys on your Mac. If it isn’t, you’re doing more work than you need to.