Big Sur’s new look is growing on me. Some of its changes definitely make life more difficult: one which keeps tripping me up is how hard it can be to find a section of window bar which I can use for dragging that window around. I think I’m gradually getting used to that, but there’s one remaining problem which infuriates me every day: that’s the way that QuickLook thumbnails and previews of rectangular images have their corners rounded.

As you can imagine, I use QuickLook to look at images of paintings pretty well daily. As anyone who has ever seen a real painting in the flesh knows, the overwhelming majority of them are rectangular with squared corners. After a few years of looking at paintings, this is expected. To constantly see QuickLook thumbnails and previews with rounded corners is jarring. Every single image looks wrong.

It’s enough to make Edvard Munch scream. Look at those four rounded corners: he was a prolific artist, but never once in his life painted on a support with corners like those.

Close up that QuickLook thumbnail seen in Finder is just wrong. It’s a lie, plain and simple. Someone has horribly mutilated every painting that I see in Big Sur.

That’s the QuickLook preview, which is no better. That’s not Munch’s painting, it’s something which has been redesigned. Wrongly.

Opening images in Preview is no better if they’re scaled to the view. To see that painting rendered faithfully as a rectangle I have to used third-party software like GraphicConverter.

That’s how Munch’s painting really looks. If anyone in Apple doesn’t believe me, go and see the original. And to pretend that any designer can render The Scream better than Munch is sheer travesty.

QuickLook has one job to do: to render as faithfully as possible the image for each thumbnail or preview.

Apple: please remove this rounding error which screams out the arrogance of the designer.