Quick Look power tips: working with multiple files

Quick Look power tips: working with multiple files

You’ve worked on a project that’s generated multiple versions of many files with next-to-useless names, and now you need to send the best ones to your colleagues. How can you efficiently rummage through the candidates, when even the apps that created them can’t give you a good overview of multiple files? All you need is the often-overlooked features of OS X’s Quick Look.

Start with selection techniques

To use multiple files in Quick Look, you must first select them in the Finder. What’s the best way? Click one filename and then Shift-click another to select the two items and everything in-between; for noncontiguous files, switch to Command-clicking. Drag to select some items in a window, or get them all with Edit -> Select All (Command-A). To select files that are in different folders—as long as those folders are in the same parent folder—set the enclosing folder’s window to List view, expand the subfolders by clicking their expansion arrows, and Command-click to select the target items.

After you’ve selected multiple items, open the Quick Look window by selecting File -> Quick Look