If you’re an OS X 10.5 user and you prefer to look at your Finder windows in icon view mode set to its maximum—128-by-128 pixels—size, here’s a little timesaver when drag-selecting icons from such windows. It seems there’s a bug of sorts in the 10.5 Finder that makes such operations quite slow, especially if the window contains a large number of icons. If you try drag-selecting a bunch of 128-by-128 pixel icons in such a window, you’ll notice some visual freezes and jumps as you drag the mouse around. These lags can be distracting and annoying, as they make it tougher to drag-select just the group of icons you want to select.
To prevent this problem, open the View Options window (Command-J) and drag the icon size slider down to the first tick mark from the right—112-by-112 pixels. At this size setting, I don’t see any of the lag issues that I see when using the 128-by-128 pixel size. You might have success with slightly larger sizes, but I find the first tick mark is an easy mark to hit when dragging the slider.
After you’re done with your drag-select operation, move the View Options slider back up to your preferred 128-by-128 pixel setting. If you leave the View Options window open while doing your drag-select operation, you can do this icon-size-changing routine with a minimum of fuss. Press Command-J, move the icon size slider, perform your drag-select operation, move the icon size slider back, then press Command-J again. While it’s not ideal, I find it much nicer drag-selecting the smaller icons without the visual delays associated with the full-sized versions.
Updated at 8:09am to change Get Info to View Options.