Google Image Search with preview? [like the spotlight's extension: flashlight]

[mesqueeb]

Dear Community,

 

I used to use spotlight's extension called 'flashlight' which I especially loved for it's image search that gives the results inside the spotlight window.

Meaning if I quickly want to search for an image I could write "gi cat" and it would show me the cat images right away in the spotlight window. -> I did not have to launch the browser at all!

 

Is there any workflow or functionality in Alfred that mimics this behaviour?

Cheers!

[deanishe]

Alfred doesn't allow you to display remote images (i.e. give it a URL), not can it "lazy load" images.

 

As a result, while it's possible to implement such a workflow, it would likely be clunky and slow to use because it will have to download all the images it wants to display before it can show any results.

 

You could work around this by just displaying the URLs of the images in the results and using Alfred's preview feature (hit SHIFT on a result) to open a Quick Look window with the URL.

 

That may or may not be a satisfactory solution.

[mesqueeb]

Dear Deanishe,

 

Flashlight was able to pull it off without being slow at all! Maybe they just cashed some of the small thumbnails that google images offer, and it could display them really fast inside the spotlight search box.

 

This is the only reason why I loved flashlight so much more than alfred, so I hope this can be integrated.

[deanishe]

Flashlight was able to pull it off without being slow at all! Maybe they just cashed some of the small thumbnails that google images offer, and it could display them really fast inside the spotlight search box.

It's far simpler than that. Spotlight's extended info window is basically just a WebView and Flashlight's Google Search plugin basically just spits out the URL for a Google search. What you're looking at in Spotlight is google.com loading just like it would in Safari.

Alfred doesn't work that way. In particular, it won't load any remote data for you and it won't run your script again until the user changes the query.

I reckon about the best you can do with Alfred is the way I did it in Searchio!: Alfred's results are search suggestions, and you hit SHIFT on a result to Quick Look the URL: