QLook Parquet

Select a Parquet file and press Space to see what’s inside.

QLook Parquet adds Apache Parquet previews to Finder’s Quick Look — schema, rows and metadata, without opening a notebook, writing a query or launching an app.

Two views, one keypress

• Table — the schema on the left, the rows on the right. Check the fields you want and they become table columns.
• JSON — the file footer as a readable JSON document on the left, and data as JSON Lines on the right, with one object per row.

Built for real data files

• Focused previews — browse large files through a bounded window of rows, without loading the entire table into memory.
• Every type — integers, decimals, dates, timestamps (with or without a UTC designation), binary, INT96 and more, shown the way the file defines them.
• Nested data — lists, maps and structs appear as compact chips. Click one to see every item in place. Double-click another cell to inspect its value.
• Row groups — jump between row groups from the toolbar.
• Every common codec — Snappy, GZIP, ZSTD, LZ4 and Brotli. Supports both .parquet and .parq files.

Work with what you see

• Pick columns — check or uncheck fields, drag to reorder, resize or auto-fit columns, hide what you don’t need.
• Copy in the format you need — copy selected cells as tab-separated text (with or without column names), as JSON, or as SQL literals. Copy a whole row as JSON from the JSON view. Click a column heading to select the whole column. Long copies in Table show progress; click Copy again to cancel.
• Inspect the footer — view the writing tool, compression, format version, row groups, column statistics and key-value metadata, and copy them as JSON.
• Your format — show missing values as NULL, a dash or blank; show timestamps as stored, in UTC or in local time; turn row numbers on or off.
• Clear answers — errors in a damaged column are contained within that column. If a file cannot be read (for example, because it is encrypted), a message explains why.
• Light and Dark — automatically matches your system appearance.

Private by design

Everything happens on your Mac. QLook Parquet has no network access at all — the sandbox enforces it. Files are opened read-only and never modified, and no extra files are created alongside them. No accounts, no analytics, no tracking.

Native and fast

Written in Swift with Apache Arrow’s Rust Parquet reader built into the app. Universal: runs natively on Apple Silicon and Intel Macs. Requires macOS 14 or later.

Get started: launch QLook Parquet once, enable its Quick Look extension if needed, then select a .parquet or .parq file in Finder and press Space. A sample file is included. Encrypted Parquet files are not supported.