Here’s a good question from one of our readers. A recent switcher to the Mac, Carol Kavanaugh writes: “I got a Mac a few months ago and love it so far, but when I browse a folder full of pictures in Windows a thumbnail image of each picture shows up as its icon, on my Mac I get just a generic icon, is there any way to have Mac OS automatically make thumbnails of my images?” There sure is Carol, in Mac OS X it’s called ‘icon preview’ and here’s how to enable it:

Enabling image thumbnails in the Finder

• From the Finder, hit command-J (or navigate from the View menu to Show View Options)
• Inside the View Options panel, check the ’show icon preview’ box
• Close View Options and now you’ll have thumbnails for each image!

By default, Mac OS X shows just a simple icon. This is what you will see with ‘icon preview’ enabled, a thumbnail of the image:

Note: If the folder has a ton of images in it, opening that folder initially may take a second or two longer than usual as a thumbnail is generated for each image. Most people find the useful nature of thumbnails enough to have the slight lag not bother them.