Quick Look is one of my favorite Mac features, so much so that I always use a third party app enable it on my Windows PCs as well. It allows you to preview files on your Mac without opening them. You can select any file in Finder and press the Spacebar key to preview it. This means I can press one button to quickly look at videos, listen to audio files, view images, or read documents. While this feature is great, I’ve always been annoyed that it doesn’t work well with folders— until now.
By default, Quick Look will tell you how many files are in a folder, but doesn’t actually tell you which files are in it. Thankfully, a new free utlity named Folder Preview closes that gap. Folder Preview lets you expand Quick Look’s full functionality to folders. You select a folder, press the Spacebar, and Folder Preview will let you see all the files and folders inside of it, without actually opening it. It takes less than a minute to configure and silently does its job from that point on. It also doesn’t ask for any permissions other than being added as a Finder extension, which is always nice to see.
Credit: Pranay Parab
Once you install Folder Preview, the app will prompt you to add it as a system extension. Go to System Settings on your Mac and navigate to General > Login Items & Extensions. Scroll to the bottom and click the i button next to Quick Look. Enable Folder Preview on this page to finish setting up the app. Now, selecting any folder in Finder and pressing Spacebar (or the app’s own default keybinding—Command-Y) will display its contents.
You can also configure Folder Preview to show hidden files by going to its settings. Just open the app and go to Settings in the left pane. I’ve left this option disabled because I rarely want to see hidden system files on my Mac, but you can choose otherwise if needed. You can also ask the app to automatically expand folders while previewing. If you have a folder within a folder, this setting will show you the contents of up to five levels of nested folders. Lastly, you can also choose a larger size for icons in your folder previews.
