macOS: fix issues with Quick Look preview

In my opinion, Quick Look is one of the best functions of macOS by far. Pressing the spacebar easily displays a preview of countless file formats, such as photos or PDF files. It's just stupid that the Quick Look preview doesn't work from time to time. On my MacBook Pro with macOS Monterey, Quick Look only showed thumbnails instead of the correct preview – it just works and so ;-) If this is the case for you, you can usually fix it very easily.

Quick Look not working on Mac? Just restart ;-)

If pressing the spacebar in the Mac Finder just produces a mini-thumbnail instead of a "real" preview, the QuickLook service seems to be tangled. The solution is pleasantly simple: just restart the service. To do this, proceed as follows:

1. Opens the Activity indicator from macOS (e.g. via Spotlight search per Alt + Spacebar)
2. Search for the entry using the search field at the top right QuickLookUIService.
3. Now mark the entry without brackets behind it in the search results.
4. Now click that X in the Activity Monitor menu bar, and then select the command Quit imediately.
5. Profit!

These steps will cause macOS to stop and restart the Quick Look system service. Ideally, the Finder preview should now work again. Is not that the case? Then marked QuickLook search results in Activity Monitor and exits. Now Quick Look should work again.

Alternatively, you can simply exit and restart the Mac Finder. How it works? Let's show you in this tutorial in four different ways. And of course a complete Mac restart also brings the solution, but that is usually not necessary at all – who restarts macOS if there isn’t an update right now ;-)

Unfortunately, I haven't found out yet what exactly is responsible for the Finder preview not working correctly. If you have an idea or at least a suspicion, please let us know in the comments below this tuto!

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Apple 2022 MacBook Air laptop with M2 chip: 13,6" Liquid Retina display, 8GB RAM, 256 GB SSD storage, backlit keyboard, 1080p FaceTime HD camera. Compatible with iPhone/iPad; midnight blue

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Would you like more tips and tricks about the Mag? We have: Simple this direction, please. The skeptic emoji used in the initial image is from the Twemoji project from Twitter and is under the CC BY 4.0 License.