Thumbnail Icons for Delish Bookmarks

So, what are normal people doing tonight?

I’ve been messing around with some more ideas surrounding the future of bookmarking and information gathering. As part of that process, I bought Delish and started messing around with some Spotlight/Finder integration¹. I won’t go into all of the kMDItemAwesome of that, but I did work out a trick on the way that might actually be useful.

The thumbnails for Delish cache folders (and what shows up in a Finder Smart Folder) are all… broccoli? I figured it shouldn’t be too hard to make them prettier for searching. The technique should be able to be applied to any application’s files which provide a Quick Look preview.

Here’s the script:

#!/bin/bash

target=$1
filename=`basename $1`
image="${TMPDIR}${filename}.png"
rsrc="${TMPDIR}icn.rsrc"

# Create a thumbnail from the file preview
qlmanage -t -s 512 -o ${TMPDIR} $target

# apply the image to itself as an thumbnail icon
sips -i $image

# Extract the icon resource
DeRez -only icns $image > $rsrc

# Make the target accept a custom icon
SetFile -a C $target

# Apply the icon resource to the target
Rez -append $rsrc -o $target

# clean up
rm $rsrc $image

Pointless in this particular case, but if I can get you to use it, I can feel good about my wasted evening.