How to see a EPS Thumbnail in macOS Monterey and above
So in Catalina you could browse and preview EPS files in finder. From Big Sur and above this feature was removed for some reason. You will be pleased to know the fix is rather easy. In short you need to add this string value to a Plist file inside the library Quick Look folder and reboot.
<string>com.adobe.illustrator.ai-image</string>
This is what we are trying to achieved thumbnail of the .EPS files in finder.
From Big Sur onwards the default view is finder is as above without any thumbnail.
On the machine with the issue which is every Mac OS since Catalina 10.15. go to Macintosh HD/System/Library/Quicklook. location the illustrator.glgenerator file and copy the file to the desktop.
I put my file in a new folder on the desktop then right click show package contents.
You need the info.plist file. If you right click you should be able to open it in text file editor.
Search or location the string “<string>com.adobe.encapsulated-postscript</string>” Below that string you need to add this string <string>com.adobe.illustrator.ai-image</string> then save and close the file. (see above)
Your new edited file needs to now be moved into the Macintosh HD/Library/Quicklook folder
Here I am dragging the file to the quicklook folder. This will promote you for the admin password. Once done Reboot the machine !
The end results is the thumb nail files for EPS are now showing up in finder.
So how did we know what to edit when the answer is in the old version of the Mac. On my 10.15 Catalina machine if you navigate to the EPS.glgenerator and right click show package content and open the info.plist it shows you the string needed to generate the .eps thumbnails in finder.As you can see in the screenshot above the string code is highlighted which is where the code needed to be added to fix the issue in machines with macOS 11 and above. As for why it was changed when the next version of the OSX came out I don’t know. You would have thought with all the new macOS and builds that came out after this “bug was identified” you would have thought Apple developers would have fixed it. As you can see the fix is very easy to accomplish.
