Pixelated image thumbnails in Finder Icon view

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Pixelated image thumbnails in Finder Icon view

Why does my iMac (Ventura 13.7.4) pixelate my high-quality images when I view them in Finder icon mode?? One support thread I found talked about adjusting this in Finder settings, but I was unable to find this adjustment in Ventura 13.7.4. Oddly, not all of the images are pixelated, but I cannot figure out what the difference is between the ones that appear pixelated and the ones that appear sharp. In fact, in some cases, thumbnails of images under 100k in size appear sharper than thumbnails of images 50mb in size. So it doesn't make sense. This problem has existed since I purchased this machine in 2017. Any ideas would be much appreciated. Here's an example at 100% scale of two adjacent images, one's sharp the other is pixelated. When I open both images in Preview, they're both very sharp.

iMac 27″ 5K, macOS 13.7

Posted on Mar 5, 2025 2:12 PM

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Answer 1

dialabrain

Level 10

135,521 points

Mar 6, 2025 5:35 AM in response to tturiano

tturiano wrote:

In fact, in some cases, thumbnails of images under 100k in size appear sharper than thumbnails of images 50mb in size. So it doesn't make sense.

Actually it does. Much more compression, and therefor image loss, would occur on a much larger image being sized down to icon size.

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Answer 2

dialabrain

Level 10

135,521 points

Mar 6, 2025 6:17 AM in response to tturiano

There's no way to reduce the size of an image to icon size using any operating system without compression. Screens only have so much resolution. Just an example, if you have an image that is 512x512px and reduce it to 100x100px, you are going to lose 252144 pixels.

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Answer 3

dialabrain

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135,521 points

Mar 6, 2025 10:23 AM in response to tturiano

Well first you said you had large images that appear more pixelated than smaller images. That's what I replied to. As far as your revised question, one thing that would make a difference is images that are saved in different formats. JPGs will look more pixelated than PNGs for example.

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Answer 4

tturiano Author

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Mar 6, 2025 10:52 AM in response to dialabrain

I said "in some cases." The high-res image being pixelated next to a low-res image being unpixelated I thought was the most paradoxical example. Apparently not from what you said about compression. But there is no apparent pattern to the occurrence of pixelation and no pixelation. There are only JPGs and TIFs in the folder and no pattern of pixelation.

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Answer 5

tturiano Author

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Mar 6, 2025 6:06 AM in response to dialabrain

Is there anyway to prevent Ventura from compressing those thumbnails?

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Answer 6

tturiano Author

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Mar 6, 2025 10:14 AM in response to tturiano

I don't think it has anything to do with pixel dimensions because I have images with a large number of pixels that look fine in the Finder thumbnail icons. There's something else awry.

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Answer 7

dialabrain

Level 10

135,521 points

Mar 6, 2025 11:07 AM in response to tturiano

Well, jpg's are a compressed format to begin with, tiffs are uncompressed. Perhaps someone else will have a better explanation.

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Pixelated image thumbnails in Finder Icon view

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