If you are wondering why it is that your raw files suddenly don’t show previews in Finder, it isn’t just you. It looks like the Apple release of MacOS 15.4 and 15.4.1includes a bug that breaks previewing of many raw file types (Canon and Nikon reported heavily).
If you need to see previews in Finder you have two options to make it work while we let Apple work on fixing the bug:
- Use the icon view
- Click on the border of the finder window as if you were going to resize it.
Use Icon View
The Icon view in Finder still shows all the thumbnails of the raw files. It is less useful if you are trying to select large quantities of images because you can’t shift-click, but it works.
Pro Tip: While in icon view in Finder you can user your mouse to click outside of the icon image and select groups of images. You can even hold down the shift key while you click and drag selecting groups of images.
To use Icon view use can use the keyboard shortcut command-1, go to the View menu and choose “as List”, or use the view Icon in the upper part of the Finder title bar just to the right of the folder name being shown.
You can see the that preview area in Finder is still showing black, but all of the raw files are showing previews in the main window. You can make all of those icon previews bigger with the keyboard shortcut command-J or by going to the View menu and choosing Show View Options. This will bring up a new window that looks something like this:
Increase the Icon Size to make them bigger and you may want to reduce the Grid Spacing so that you can fit more icons near eat other. This makes the icons bigger, but also makes it so that you have to scroll in the Finder window to see the images, making it very hard to select groups of images of that is what you are after:
Good news is, super easy to fix that. Go to the View menu and choose Clean Up By > Name (or whatever you are sorting your photos by). Now there is now scroll bar to see the images in icon view
Click on the Finder Border
If you only need to see the preview of the raw file you have chosen there is a one-click workaround to this bug; click on any border of the Finder window.
I discovered that if I resized the Finder window the black preview box would be replaced with the preview of the raw file. Then I discovered that if you just click on the border of the Finder window that also happens. If you are needing to stay in List view and just need to see the preview, give the border a click and it will show.