Dropbox Finder integration breaks Quick Look and thumbnails - Mac OS Mojave 10.14

[Andrew D.4]

For the past few months I've been having issues with image previews not loading on my Mac in Quick Look, Finder previews or icon thumbnails. I have experienced the problem on both Mac OS High Sierra and Mojave. My colleagues also seem to be experiencing the same issue.

I finally took the time this week to figure out what is causing the issue. As far as I can tell the problem is caused by Dropbox Finder integration. As soon as I turned off Dropbox finder integration (and restart the machine) file previews and Quick Look work perfectly.

For now I'm keeping Dropbox Finder integration turned off - I'm a designer and image previews are incredibly useful.  I'd prefer to be able to enable Dropbox Finder integration as the sync status icons are useful. 

Has anyone else experienced this? Is there a fix?

[Jay]

@jwvink, @irishetcher, would it be okay if we reach out to your email addresses associated with your forum profile in order to investigate this matter further?

[jwvink]

@Jay no problem. You can contact me. I hope i can help to discover and desolve the problem.

[irishetcher]

Howdy,

Fixed my problem with the jpegs. It may not have been anything to do with Dropbox or Mojave. I fiddled with some graphics settings in the BIOS and all is good again.

[Allyson B.]

Same problem here. Tried upgrading to Mojave 10.14.2 and disenabling Finder integration, restarting, enabling Finder integration, restarting - neither resolved the issue. Following this in hopes of a fix soon.

[3guk]

Hey Guys,

If it's causing you issues you can just delete the dropbox quicklook plugin - sadly this recreates itself each time dropbox is started but you can work around that too:

In terminal use the following commands 

rm -r ~/Library/QuickLook/DropboxQL.qlgenerator

touch ~/Library/QuickLook/DropboxQL.qlgenerator

qlmanage -r

In short, the first command removes the quicklook generator that dropbox installs. The second command creates a new empty file, so that dropbox can't install it's quicklook plugin when it starts up. Then the last command restarts the QuickLook service that creates the thumbnails.

This works perfectly for me, until the dropbox guys can come up with a QLplugin that doesn't cause my system to hang.

[matsev]

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@Jay wrote:

@jwvink, @irishetcher, would it be okay if we reach out to your email addresses associated with your forum profile in order to investigate this matter further?

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@Hey @Jay

Is there any final fix to the Quick Look issue? I am managing a design agency of 40 people and we're all hanging there to see if there's a solution from DropBox coming up? 

thanks
Matteo

[3guk]

Matsev, If you use the fix that I mentioned it fixes the issue completely - at least as far as my testing and the other users in my office have found.

James

[Jay]

Hi @matsev, I don’t have any update on this matter as of yet. 

Would it be okay if we reach out to your email address associated with your forum profile to investigate this further?

[matsev]

Thanks @Jay, that's alright with me. Looking forward to a solution 

best

m. 

[hiimak]

I'm having the same issue, have had it for quite some time. I have a business account also. Dropbox - please reach out to my email to help. 

@3guk -- may have to try your solution. Thanks!