View thumbnails from cbr/cbz in finder

[DemonSlayer]

Hi,

Is there a way to have a preview/thumbnail from cbr/cbz files in finder just like CBXshell does for windows explorer?

Best regards

 

[DeltaMac]

All you need is a quicklook generator to do that natively in OS X.
I found something called Simple Comic that does that, along with other features. You could try it out…
http://dancingtortoise.com/simplecomic/

 

[DemonSlayer]

Thx,

This is what i was looking for.

 

[extracampine]

I opened that app, but it doesn't seem to get CBR thumbnails to show in finder?

 

[Pastorofmuppetz]

I'm having the same problems. Been using simple comic for years and in the last few weeks around the time of the last Mac update i now have no images for my comic files. Just blank white rectangles. It used to show the cover of each comic in finder but this is so much work to find the comics i'm looking for on my system with out the images. Anyidea what to do? I've done a few things but nothing worked so far.

 

[DeltaMac]

Maybe you could try contacting the developer for Simple Comic...?
but, that has not had any updates for 12 years, and the main code for the app has not had any changes for more than 5 years.
I suspect that the QuickLook and thumbnail generators have been deprecated somehow, over time. There IS updated code, but I have no idea if that did anything to the app's thumbnail generator, and I don't know what you can do, even if you get the updated code (or even if it will help)

GitHub - arauchfuss/Simple-Comic: OS X comic viewer

OS X comic viewer. Contribute to arauchfuss/Simple-Comic development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

 

[Pastorofmuppetz]

I've been using Simple Comic for almost a decade now and it's been brilliant. However I recently updated to an M1 MacBook with Monterey and now every CBR and CBZ file look like a blank white document. I can only run Simple Comic 1.7 on the M1 as 1.9 won't install. I've contacted apple as well but no joy there. It's impossible to browse my comics now as all the files look the same and the cover art of the comics used to be visible and now it's now. Have you any advice? All the CBR/ CBZ files are set to simple comic as the default app. I've also tried changing it to preview, and have cleared the finder cache as well. Hope someone can help me.

 

[DeltaMac]

I've been using Simple Comic for almost a decade now and it's been brilliant. However I recently updated to an M1 MacBook with Monterey and now every CBR and CBZ file look like a blank white document. I can only run Simple Comic 1.7 on the M1 as 1.9 won't install. I've contacted apple as well but no joy there. It's impossible to browse my comics now as all the files look the same and the cover art of the comics used to be visible and now it's now. Have you any advice? All the CBR/ CBZ files are set to simple comic as the default app. I've also tried changing it to preview, and have cleared the finder cache as well. Hope someone can help me.

My advice is above in post #6, try contacting Simple Comic's developer...

With little, to no activity on that github site for several years, it is looking like abandonware - you may get to wait a long time for a response.

 

[Lifeisabeach]

Hey guys, Simple Comic was forked some time ago by MaddTheSane and is distributed for free via the App Store. It is being actively developed, with the current version at 1.9.5 and works great on my M1 MBA.

GitHub - MaddTheSane/Simple-Comic: macOS comic viewer

macOS comic viewer. Contribute to MaddTheSane/Simple-Comic development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

I stumbled into this thread myself because I just discovered that thumbnails are no longer present for me now, on Monterey and Ventura. I'm not sure when this happened, but I have two apps that both could do these thumbnails, Simple Comic and EdgeView (EdgeView would somehow take precedence over Simple Comic's generator), but now I have none. I'm guessing this started with Monterey since it affects me on that also, but I'm not sure why. I'm still digging into it, but I'm guessing something was deprecated or some other change made that I'm missing.

 

[Lifeisabeach]

A quick update on my last post here. I may have stumbled into the problem, at least on my system. It's ComicTagger. So what I did was copy a CBZ file from my external HDD where my collection resides to the Desktop. Still a blank icon. I Force Quit Finder and re-launched it. Still blank. I then decided to start removing apps related to comics on the thought that there was a conflict, and put ComicTagger in the Trash. Then Force Quit Finder, re-launched. And BAM! The CBZ file on my Desktop now has a thumbnail!

Now, my archive on the external HDD are not generating thumbnails, at least not yet. There will be a lot to get generated. But QuickLook is working.

EDIT: thumbnails will generate on the HDD if I adjust the size of the icons up some. This is actually a problem with EdgeView's thumbnail generator, which only does them when Finder is set to show icons. But disabling EdgeView's QuickLook extension in the System Preferences/Settings fixes this and lets Simple Comic's extension take over.

EDIT 2: I wasn't crazy about leaving ComicTagger off my system entirely, but i couldn't identify what component in the package was causing the problem. So I moved the app to my User Applications folder and thumbnails continue to be fine.

 

[Madd the Sane]

Since it's a problem with ComicTagger, it's probably because it uses a different Uniform Type Identifier for CBR/CBZ files than Simple Comic.

And looking at ComicTagger's source, I can confirm it uses a UTI that SimpleComic's preview extension doesn't check for.

 

[Lifeisabeach]

Thanks for chiming in, Madd. Maybe you have the answer to another conundrum I ran into. I could have sworn that Simple Comic would do thumbnails even in List view, but for me it is not at this time despite my fix as above. I get EdgeView's generic document icon... just in list view. So I tried to troubleshoot this and removed EdgeView from my Mac. After doing so, I immediately lost the generated thumbnails in Icon view that Simple Comic was handling, and the icon in List view continued to be EdgeView's generic one. This persisted despite rebooting and running a command to flush the icon cache. This is rather baffling to me.

As a side note, do you intend to update Simple Comic with a QuickLook extension that can be enabled/disabled in the System Settings of macOS? I think this was referenced on the git page.