Is there a static ‘global’ image of the components stored anywhere within the gh file format that can be extracted and displayed by a QuickLook plugin on a Mac?
I’m imagining something like the tooltip window which pops up when hovering over a cluster component, e.g.
This would be a huge timesaver when digging through a bunch of gh files trying to find a specific one, especially given that some large definitions can take up to a minute to open (even with the Solver disabled).
hi,
just a different approach:
for every .gh file, I save a “ctrl +Q” image of the file in the same folder (usually together with the viewport snapshot) with the same name.
Yep, that would be good discipline to follow but unfortunately doesn’t apply with coworkers / clients and having to deal with crazy naming conventions like
(image credit https://doctorfreelance.com/file-naming-conventions/)
hahahahahahaha
Surely, in our world the word ‘final’ expresses mainly two things:
untidiness and delusional optimism 
The gh file contains a thumbnail image of the canvas at saving time. It doesn’t include the whole file like the cluster preview (that one is drawn at runtime). The thumbnail is used in the MRU tiles on the canvas when no file is loaded.
I can add a feature like this to Grasshopper2. Logged under RH-44530
That would be awesome 
In the meantime, I did find a <chunk name = “Thumbnail”> in the .ghx XML format which seems to contain a b64-encoded 100x150 PNG, and it should be quite trivial to code a 3rd party QL plugin to display this – How would one extract that information from a .gh file though?
You have to use GH_IO.dll to examine gh files (and you may as well use it to examine ghx files while you’re at it).
GH_IO.dll is a standalone assembly that does not depend on Rhino or Grasshopper in any way, but it does require the .NET framework.
Yes, I think a thumbnail of GH canvas snapshot in the explorer windows would be very helpful. I always thought Rhino’s .3dm thumbnail preview was a thoughtful, time-saver feature with hundreds of files.
This is a good idea. I’ve logged it (RH-44564).
The only reason this gets a little dicy is that modern Mac’s tend to have 5k displays, so the Quicklook images need to be quite large. This can bloat the file quite a bit. For example, an empty 3dm file on macOS is about 3.7 mb, whereas its Windows counterpart is much smaller. With a Grasshopper file, this could take up a LOT of space.
@DavidRutten I forget (and I’m too lazy to look at source right now): is there a Save Small equivalent for Grasshopper files?