Mojave quicklook stuck at loading

findermojavepreviewquicklook

Some days after installing Mac OS Mojave my quick look startet showing the spinning icon in the finder sidebar and when i press space on media files (.jpg, .png, .gif, .psd, .pdf, etc.).

Preview

Here what i tried so far:

  • Rebooted in safe mode (no effect)
  • Deleted com.apple.finder.plist and relaunched finder
  • The approach suggested here Quicklook not working

When trying the last approach my termnial freezes when i try to force reload the list using qlmanage -r.

Freeze

I then tried to generate a preview of an image, and got this error
Error

I'm thinking maybe one of these apps could be causing trouble, but they didn't do in High Sierra:

  • Dropbox
  • Adobe Creative Cloud
  • iCloud drive (synced with desktop)

Any help would be greatly appreciated, for now i'm using Adobe Bridge to search files.

Best Answer

A combination of the answers in here + killing all QuickLook-related processes fixed it for me. I have been experiencing this ever since the Mojave update. No reboot required.

qlmanage -r commands always got stuck for me, too.

Fix TL;DR version:

  1. Delete DropboxQL.qlgenerator from ~/Library/QuickLook (Credit to suntrop)
  2. Restart Finder
  3. sudo update_dyld_shared_cache -force (Credit to Dishoperator)
  4. Kill all QuickLook-related processes
  5. Restart Finder

Fix detailed how-to version follows

For those not very familiar with what the above means.

To get QuickLook working when previewing files with spacebar:

  1. Delete DropboxQL.qlgenerator in ~/Library/QuickLook, as per suntrop's suggestion.

    • Open Finder
    • Press ⌘+G
    • ~/Library/QuickLook
    • Look for a file named DropboxQL.qlgenerator, it will probably be the only one
    • Delete it, and then delete it from Trash

  2. Restart Finder:

    • Press ⌘ ⌥ ␛ (Command + Option + Escape)
    • Find Finder
    • Click Relaunch

To get thumbnails to work:

  1. Run the Terminal command Dishoperator suggested: sudo update_dyld_shared_cache -force

    • It doesn't do any harm, it just updates the kernel caches
    • Open Terminal
    • Paste sudo update_dyld_shared_cache -force
    • Type in your password (it will not appear as you're typing)
    • Press Return
    • It will take ~30s to a couple minutes depending on your machine

  2. Open up Activity Monitor (⌘+Spacebar, type in Activity Monitor)

  3. Order by Process Name

  4. Force quit quicklookd

    • Click on quicklookd
    • Press the X stop-like button in the top left
    • Press Force quit

  5. Force quit all instances of QuickLookSatellite

  6. Keep force-quitting until none of them are left

    • Make sure you order processes by name to see them all at once

  7. Restart Finder (see point 2. Restart Finder: again if you forgot how)

Keep having problems?

Since this is now working for me, but in case it still doesn't for you, here are some apps that would normally be suspects but are NOT the cause. This should narrow-down your search:

  • Dropbox (was a problem)
  • Sketch 52.2
  • Principle
  • CraftManager
  • Photoshop CS6
  • Illustrator CS6
  • Bear
  • Highland 2
  • Kindle
  • Atom, PhpStorm, Sublime Text, Caret
  • p4merge
  • Slack
  • Screenhero (don't know why I still keep it)
  • SourceTree
  • Chrome, Safari, FireFox
  • Franz
  • 1Password
  • Spotify
  • Shazam
  • TeamViewer
  • Steam
  • Flux (don't know why I still keep this one either)
  • Microsoft OneNote
  • Bartender 3
  • PSequel
  • Postico
  • GoToMeeting
  • Kaleidoscope
  • MindNode 5
  • Podio
  • Fluid UI
  • Gliffy Diagrams
  • Conceptboard
  • Moqups
  • Wireframe.cc
  • Graph.tk
  • SketchUp, Layout, StyleBuilder
  • Google Keep
  • VLC
  • Trello
  • Asana
  • LiveMinutes
  • Zoom
  • Amphetamine

And remember to clean up useless apps from your laptop. Which I clearly don't.

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