I am looking for a way (public or otherwise) to get an NSView, NSImage, CGImageRef, etc that shows the QuickLook preview for a file. Essentially the equivalent of QLThumbnailImageCreate() but for the preview.

The public APIs I can find do not support this. They allow the creation of a thumbnail image or a QLPreviewPanel. The panel does in fact display the quick look preview, but I cannot get access to the preview's appearance to embed it in other views, nor can I display multiple previews at once.

For background, I am writing an app where users can embed links to other files that should be displayed inline, kind of like an <img> tag in HTML. For images like JPGs and PDFs it's easy to figure out what to display. I thought that for other formats I would use Quick Look to generate a nice visual representation of the file's contents. This way the set of formats supported by my application would be easily extensible (just download new Quick Look generators).