Question for the Mac users out there:

Is there any way, both painless and free, to see PDF files as thumbnails in my folders? I have ten jillion knitting patterns in PDF format. They are all named with numbers (I know, I need to fix that eventually). I want to find one. I do not want to have to open every single one of them. I am not kidding about there being jillions of them.

I see that I can see them in the view where you choose a file and it shows the preview, but that is still going to take forever.

Help? Please?

UPDATE: OK, to deal with the problem, I picked all the PDF files out of my Clean Up, Clean Up Now, OMG Sort, and NOW NOW NOW folders. Uh huh. I have folders with those very names, and inside them are dated folders containing whatever crap was cluttering my desktop on the day I couldn’t stand it anymore and decided to toss it in a folder to deal with later. For the record, I currently have two years of later to deal with on the Mac, and you don’t want to know how many of these folders and how many years of crap there are on my old PC. Anyway, then I went through each of them in the folder view that gives the PDF preview. I found the pattern. In fact, I found four copies of the pattern with four different file names. I guess I really liked that pattern!

The question still stands, because it would be awesome to be able to see the PDF preview thumbnail while looking at my folders in the regular icon view. So I still want to be able to do that.

But at least I found the damn pattern I was looking for, and now I can go to bed for two hours and get up to a Monday morning. :P

SHOOT ME NOW: I was just reminded that Spotlight searches inside PDF files, and knowing the name of the yarn in the pattern, it came up easily. Everyone can now watch me bang my head against the wall for forgetting how wonderful my iMac is.