Preview and file information

Quick Look and live previews

Select a file and press Space or ⌘Y for Quick Look. ⌥⌘Y requests the slideshow variant. Use View → Show Preview (⇧⌘P) to keep an inspector alongside the file view. Gallery and Column view also provide previews where supported.

Images, PDFs, and supported media use native preview rendering. Unavailable cloud bytes, unsupported types, links, and other ineligible items can show an icon and explanation instead. A preview is not a promise that every third-party file format has a renderer. Space in a text field remains a space.

Get Info and tags

Choose File → Get Info (⌘I) for names, location, kind, dates, size, and available metadata. Multi-item selection has a summary. Folder size calculation is explicit and can take time; logical totals are not a storage-accounting guarantee.

Use File → Tags… or the file context menu to edit tags when available. Tags appear in browsing and the sidebar; they are also searchable with tag:. Tag editing is currently unavailable in search results.

Use Edit → Copy as Pathname (⌥⌘C) to copy a path as text. The ordinary Copy command copies file references.

Open, Open With, and Share

Double-click or use ⌘O/⌘↓ to open the selection. The context menu's Open With choices use installed applications. Share opens the native sharing picker; the services offered depend on macOS and the selection.

Quick Actions: current availability

Markup opens the file in Preview; it is not an embedded FileOctopus markup editor.

Rotate Left (Option for right), Trim, Create PDF, and Convert Image have implementations for supported formats, but their file-changing transform boundary is currently limited to disposable fixture runs. They are not available as general production file transforms. Image conversion choices include JPEG, PNG, HEIF, and TIFF.

The selected kind, local availability, write permissions, and whether the item is a search result affect which Quick Actions are enabled. Disabled controls should be read as unavailable, not as a feature you can unlock by indexing.

Where did this file come from?

When origin metadata exists, the app can show where-from information. Search results also offer a source-details inspector. See source search for what labels such as GitHub and Gmail actually mean.