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Forum Discussion
Dropbox Finder integration breaks Quick Look and thumbnails - Mac OS Mojave 10.14
For the past few months I've been having issues with image previews not loading on my Mac in Quick Look, Finder previews or icon thumbnails. I have experienced the problem on both Mac OS High Sierra and Mojave. My colleagues also seem to be experiencing the same issue.
I finally took the time this week to figure out what is causing the issue. As far as I can tell the problem is caused by Dropbox Finder integration. As soon as I turned off Dropbox finder integration (and restart the machine) file previews and Quick Look work perfectly.
For now I'm keeping Dropbox Finder integration turned off - I'm a designer and image previews are incredibly useful. I'd prefer to be able to enable Dropbox Finder integration as the sync status icons are useful.
Has anyone else experienced this? Is there a fix?
Same problem here. Tried upgrading to Mojave 10.14.2 and disenabling Finder integration, restarting, enabling Finder integration, restarting - neither resolved the issue. Following this in hopes of a fix soon.
Hey Guys,
If it's causing you issues you can just delete the dropbox quicklook plugin - sadly this recreates itself each time dropbox is started but you can work around that too:
In terminal use the following commands
rm -r ~/Library/QuickLook/DropboxQL.qlgenerator
touch ~/Library/QuickLook/DropboxQL.qlgenerator
qlmanage -rIn short, the first command removes the quicklook generator that dropbox installs. The second command creates a new empty file, so that dropbox can't install it's quicklook plugin when it starts up. Then the last command restarts the QuickLook service that creates the thumbnails.
This works perfectly for me, until the dropbox guys can come up with a QLplugin that doesn't cause my system to hang.
Don't use the comman that starts with "touch", the first and 3rd commands work right away without system restart.
rm -r ~/Library/QuickLook/DropboxQL.qlgenerator
qlmanage -r
Thank you! That was sooooo annoying.
Guys over at St. Clair Software have a great fix for this:
https://www.stclairsoft.com/blog/2018/07/17/getting-rid-of-the-dropbox-quicklook-plugin/
It turns out that a new beta of DropBox installs its own QuickLook generator plugin that overrides the system-supplied plugin for generating a number of file and image formats – including those MS Office files. OK, fine – just delete it, right? That worked until he restarted his Mac, then DropBox launched at login and promptly (and silently) reinstalled its QuickLook plugin again. I guess it knows what’s best for us, eh?
After a little thought, we arrived at this solution:
- Delete the DropBox QuickLook generator plugin
- Create an empty file at that location to prevent DropBox from reinstalling it
Fortunately, QuickLook is smart enough to realize that an empty file isn’t going to help it generate previews, and just defaults back to the other plugins it has. Problem solved!
The easiest way to do this is to open Terminal and execute these three commands:
rm -r ~/Library/QuickLook/DropboxQL.qlgenerator touch ~/Library/QuickLook/DropboxQL.qlgenerator qlmanage -r
A nice simple solution once you get it figured out. I imagine this is one of those problems that’s going to crop up for a lot of people but isn’t quite obnoxious enough to get them to hunt down a solution. So there you go
- - - - - - - -
Here's what I did:
- Turn OFF "Finder Integration" in DB preferences & Restart to check to see if QL is working. (Mine wasn't so I continued to #2)
- Open Terminal and typed in commands from above & restarted
- My QL was now working! So then, as an experiment, I went back and tuned ON finder Integration in DB.
- Now BOTH are operating correctly. Let's see how long this will last :)
But also note that, unfortunately, QL will still NOT work if a file is not local on your hard drive. Still, I'll take what I can get.
alexolmsted wrote:Guys over at St. Clair Software have a great fix for this:
https://www.stclairsoft.com/blog/2018/07/17/getting-rid-of-the-dropbox-quicklook-plugin/
...
Here's what I did:
- Turn OFF "Finder Integration" in DB preferences & Restart to check to see if QL is working. (Mine wasn't so I continued to #2)
- Open Terminal and typed in commands from above & restarted
- My QL was now working! So then, as an experiment, I went back and tuned ON finder Integration in DB.
- Now BOTH are operating correctly. Let's see how long this will last :)
But also note that, unfortunately, QL will still NOT work if a file is not local on your hard drive. Still, I'll take what I can get.
✅ This worked for me 100%... and, yeah, I don't really mind the "online-only" files not having quicklook previews.Running MacOS Mojave 10.14.6 and Dropbox v94.4.384
I am running Dropbox v67.4.83 and have Mojave 10.14.3 installed on both my 2018 Macbook pro and my iMac 5K.
I have tried both suggestions of all 3
rm -r ~/Library/QuickLook/DropboxQL.qlgenerator touch ~/Library/QuickLook/DropboxQL.qlgenerator qlmanage -r
And the other suggested where you miss out the second starting with touch and neither have worked.
Doesn't seem to matter if I deactivate Finder Integration or not.
I am still left with Excel files and Word files not showing icon preview in and Finder view - not list, not column, not icon view, not gallery view.Does anyone have an up to date fix that actually works now? I am really wishing I never upgraded as I think the Local/Online functionality has really screwed things up with the quicklook plugin.
Hey just curious, you are trying to use QuickLook on LOCAL files correct? If finder integration is ON then there will be a green checkmark on bottom right of icon (in icon view).
If these are online only (cloud icon) QuickView will NOT work.
LMK how it goes!
-A
I have the exact same problem with a Late 2013 MBP. Turned off Dropbox Finder integration and it fixed the problem. It was driving me nuts. Never realise how much I use Quicklook until it was gone.
Wish I had found this earlier, wasted an hour chatting with Apple support with no fix (realising now it's a Dropbox issue and not an Apple one).
I'm just testing Dropbox for business and ran into the same issue. Highly annoying because it affects the whole computer, not only Dropbox files.
Still having this issue with the latest dropbox and catalina 10.15.5... Thought it was upgrading from Mojave, but it turns out uninstalling dropbox solved my issue. They really should get the app approved by the app store. All this hackery to get around finder integration is messing other parts of macOS up.
- Jay
Dropbox Staff
I'm having this same issue and have been for about a year now. Can confirm that removing the Dropbox-Finder integration and restarting fixes it completely.
The issue (for me) is not seen on an account level, but rather affects files system-wide - with no icon previews of files on my desktop or in any Finder window (they all default to the generic JPG, PDF, PNG, etc. icons built into macOS) as well as QuickLook not loading previews, either. Note: I do have both a personal and business account connected, and from my testing having one or both connected does not seem to improve or worsen this bug.
Device details: I am having this issue on a 2016 15" MBP running 10.14 Mojave. This is my work laptop and has plenty of processor, memory, SSD storage space, etc. I have a personal 2012 15" MBP running 10.14 Mojave as well - with much less processing power, memory, and a slower HDD - with these same issues, yet when I unistall Dropbox it seems like a much faster machine than my newer work laptop.
Any help here would be greatly appreciated! Thanks in advance :)
Same problem here - we have a business account and problem with finder previews at all kind of files. is a big problem for us a a design agengy cause it make processes last a lot longer. is there a solution?
Same problem here!
I disabled Finder integration, restarted computer and it works now. Enabled Finder integration again and it seems to work, for now.
In my case the problem if you have activated this option happens with all files, not just Dropbox. With all of them.
I've also been checking that the CPU usage increases a lot and makes the Mac slow down.
When working with the option disabled, you don't see which files are online and which are not (Working with Intelligent Synchronization). I have a company account and it is very annoying for the day to day.
Do you know a solution?
I have had the same problem for months since I've started using the "local / online" features of the Dropbox finder integration. It sometimes work but most of the time quicklook is not available for the recently synced files.
Screencapture here : https://www.dropbox.com/s/qcam8gjopv1yilj/Capture%20d%27%C3%A9cran%202019-01-09%2016.09.37.png?dl=0
I upgraded to Mojave today and had this same problem as you. I found your post while looking for a solution; I tried what you did "turned off dropbox finder integration" and restarted my computer, it fixed the problem.
Just for giggles, I then turned dropbox finder integration back on, and restarted my computer, and Quick Look kept working properly. You should try it to see if it fixes your problem.
Since updating Mac OS to Mojave the quicklook preview and file previews no longer work.
I've tracked down the problem the the DropboxQL.qlgenerator ...if I delete that, then it works better, but not perfectly.
Anyone esle having this problem?
Thanks.
- Jay
I have the same problem :upside_down:
Since I upgraded to OS Mojave (10.14 (18A391)) , Finder doesn't load thumbnails of files when I have Dropbox running. The preview is also not displayed.
My iMac: iMac (Retina 5K, 27 ", late 2014)
3,5 GHz Intel Core i5 // 32 GB 1600 MHz DDR3
Soo hard to work with this thing....
(deleted, issue was different)
The same phenomenon have been occurring from when the latest version of Dropbox had been released.
Andrew D.4 wrote:For the past few months I've been having issues with image previews not loading on my Mac in Quick Look, Finder previews or icon thumbnails. I have experienced the problem on both Mac OS High Sierra and Mojave. My colleagues also seem to be experiencing the same issue.
I finally took the time this week to figure out what is causing the issue. As far as I can tell the problem is caused by Dropbox Finder integration. As soon as I turned off Dropbox finder integration (and restart the machine) file previews and Quick Look work perfectly.
For now I'm keeping Dropbox Finder integration turned off - I'm a designer and image previews are incredibly useful. I'd prefer to be able to enable Dropbox Finder integration as the sync status icons are useful.
Has anyone else experienced this? Is there a fix?
