QuickLook changed while I wasn't looking!

TidBITS Talk
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My Mac is on Sequoia 15.7.5 and hasn’t been updated in a while. I’ve not installed any new software recently. I often use QuickLook to view PDFs. Until yesterday, there were three icons at the upper right: a share icon, an edit icon (circle with pencil tip), and a rotate icon (square with an arrow going around a corner). I use the rotate icon frequently. Yesterday I noticed - the rotate arrow was gone! Now it takes three clicks - the edit icon, the rotate icon, and the Done button - to do what used to take only one.

How did that happen without a MacOS update? Has anyone else noticed this, or is there something weird with my Mac?

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Golly I hadn’t noticed this, as I usually open in Preview if I need to rotate, or if I need to rotate a bunch of files I do it with Quick Actions in the contextual menu in Finder. Maybe a TBTer with under-the-hood skills will know how/weirdness. Meanwhile…

My first thought was maybe the pdf was locked but I just checked some of pdfs I created and sure enough Rotate icon is not there. Dang! But in Quicklooking a jpg file, rotate icon is there in the QuickLook icon set top right. (macOS 26.4.1)

I checked Edit Extensions… under the Share icon and didn’t find rotate there.

I poked around in System Settings > General > Login Items & Extensions and that gets to be fairly overlapping and confusing. I looked in Tinker Tool App and didn’t find it. Maybe there is a Terminal command that will make this possible…

3

I believe this probably changed with MacOS 26. The edit icon (circle with pencil tip) brings up the ‘Markup Toolbar’. After installing 26 I noticed this toolbar had changed in several ways when viewing a PDF in Preview. I suspect it also changed the toolbar access when Quickviewing a PDF.

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Thanks, but I’m still on Sequoia.

1 Like
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I hadn’t checked that, but that’s true on my system. Very strange.

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The rotate icon is still available in the Quicklook toolbar (I’m on Tahoe). You MIGHT have to “Customize” your “View” in PREVIEW to be sure that icon appears in Quicklook, which, I think relies on some aspects of Preview. (Choose VIEW menu then CUSTOMIZE TOOLBAR.) (I can’t attach a screenshot.) On my toolbar, the rotate icon appears between the Markup icon and the Share icon.

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Hard to say, without developer knowledge, how to/if one can control this. I just checked again and in Quick Look on my 26.4 mac:

  • for image files (jpg, png, heic [but not Fuji raw, .raf]) the rotate button is in the upper right (and changes rotation direction when holding Option key, as in Preview).
  • for routine everyday pdfs the rotate button is not there
  • html and xlsx files only have Share button
  • a Pages document in layout mode only Share

An Apple page on Quick Look is in their usual spare style: https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/preview-a-file-mh14119/mac

Maybe it’s like ‘ordinary’ apps where the menu options change depending on the file and there’s nothing you can change about that…

I just remembered there are plugins for Quick Look, and a quick internet search showed only third party web pages on the first 30 or more results. Here on TB from Nov ’24: What are your favorite Quick Look extensions?

Aha, wrong keyword, they’re called extensions. For those who can grasp it, here is the Apple Developer page: Quick Look | Apple Developer Documentation

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I can confirm the behaviour you are seeing on a Mac running 15.7.7. But, I don’t know how long it has been like that.

I don’t think so.

1 Like
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Thanks, @rbegleiter. The rotate icon appears for me in Preview for both PDFs and JPEGs. I tried deleting it from the toolbar and readding it, to see if that would “refresh” it in Quicklook for PDFs, but it did not.