Fixing the Path Finder "blank image" QuickLook bug

I’ve had an issue for a while now where if I browsed through images using QuickLook in Path Finder, I’d often see a blank QuickLook window. Specifically, it would happen when going back to an image I’d just viewed, which is quite a common scenario if for example you’re trying to compare two adjacent photos by toggling between them.

Cocoatech themselves have blogged about the issue and there was some discussion of this bug in the Apple Support forums. People seemed to be referring to it as the “white image” or “snap-back” bug. Plenty of tips got shared on these pages, including a cool workaround shortcut I didn’t know about, which is that you can press Alt in Quicklook to zoom into the image. Unfortunately nothing I tried actually fixed the issue though.

What did work for me was the following:

defaults write com.cocoatech.PathFinder QLEnableTextSelection -bool FALSE

In running this you’re turning off the ability to select text within QuickLook, but that doesn’t bother me too much as it’s a rare situation for me. The good news is the setting seems to take effect immediately - no restart of Path Finder required - so if you wanted to it should be possible to toggle the setting on and off according to what you’re doing.

For me though, I’m happy to just go without text selection if it makes image browsing painless.