Is there a free program or hack that will make Win 7 show TGA thumbnails when exploring folders?

MysticThumbs

Enjoy

EDIT:

Oops! not free anymore

Oh well...

or you just ditch the wrong concept of thumbnail navigation via the OS and learn how to use XnView. I use it ever since AcdSee went sucky, it supports all kinds of image types. Check this thread on how to get the best out of it:
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=64773
you can get the program here:
http://www.xnview.com/en/index.html

renderhjs: I'm curious why you're calling OS thumbnail browsing "wrong", when it seems to me it's the most immediate and wide-reaching solution by far. A 3rd party application is one step removed, and that settles it for me unless I'm missing something here.

@perna: in short: its the same reason why I choose WinRar over the default build in windows zip thing.

The long answer:
maybe that initial step is a extra one but after that it makes a lot sense to me. Like xnView starts whenever I click for the first time on a image and it opens it with a snap 100% not resized in a minimalistic view with a black background.
After that I can just scroll with the mouse wheel to quickly slide through the images in that folder. To me its about the navigation things those tools have build in, like the mousewheel navigation (mouse wheel to flick to next / previous image), middle mouse button = fullscreen, enter to switch to thumbnail mode.
There is some smart stuff like when you hit ctrl + c it copies the image as in a file so that you can paste it as a file to a folder but also as a bitmap clipboard so you can paste it in Photoshop, or if you select a area and copy it it copies just that section as bitmap data to the clipboard - its just essential stuff to me. You can even customize a shortcut to fireup photoshop or open the image in PS (like in the background) while flipping through your images.

But also that it filters only images, not videos, audio or other files I don't care for this kind of task. In windows I get thumbnails for everything and its sometimes hard to filter out videos or other things that come as picture thumbnails. I always end up using the details view in windows because the other views eat to much space and are always useless to me.

In addition to that is a nice environment to select thumbnails in a visual way and then for example convert them on the fly to a different image format, or batch apply filters, batch rename them,... just stuff around working with multiple images. Windows was not build so specifically it always approaches it in a broader and much more consumer oriented way. So to me as a artist or someone who works everyday with bitmaps booth for navigation and technical tasks a tool like xnView is just a standard equipment to run my computer with.

Oh and one more thing: can read over 400 image formats (dds, game specific engine formats, psd,...). I don't need to be afraid to look for some plugin so I can see the thumbnails or convert it even though Adobe bridge or PS can't do it.

Sure yeah once you launch it, XnView is a great viewer - but still, being able to visualize the images before even clicking on them is pretty awesome (I use both image thumbnails AND XNView myself hehe)

Renderhjs, you can do the things you describe your thumbnail viewer doing, in windows, better and more efficiently. From what you're writing it seems you're using (or are accustomed to) XP SP2. Win7 thumbnail features are VERY GOOD and go beyond anything that can possibly be done in a 3rd party app. I really recommend you check it out and learn the capabilities. I'll jot down a few notes to help things along:

First of all, you really should use project setups (max and maya both have very good support for this). Dumping all files in the same directory is bad practice no matter what. So you have a solution that filters out anything but images, well, what if the file you're after is not an image? Then you're back to square one and really need to sort files better.

That said, however, windows can categorize according to file type. Please note that I don't mean sorting, but categorization independently of sorting (which can still be set to time, name, etc).

If I ever need to do something complex like batch-conversion, I'll just use my 3rd party thumbnail viewer, same as you. Having a good windows thumbnail viewing setup doesn't exclude you from using 3rd party solutions in the rare cases that you may need them. And if you need to use them a lot that sort of thing can be scripted quite easily in the native windows explorer interface (passing multiple selections to batch-conversion for example, easy to setup, and I'm sure your image viewer supports this stuff in command line like most good image viewers do)

You mention 400 image file formats. For my personal needs I only ever use a limited set of formats (if someone here sends me PCX I'll tear him a new one), but regardless - windows has something called Windows Imaging Component now. That's basically like video codecs, but for images. This means that extended thumbnail support is no longer a hack (previous DDS thumbnail viewers would compromise system stability in XP) but an actual integral and easily 3rd-party extentable feature of windows.

So, not only can windows nowadays do all that I require of thumbnails (and needless to say I deal with thumbs a LOT), but it can do things that no third party app can do, namely it's integrated into the core, so all file dialogs support them.

Say I want to overwrite an image in a folder with what I'm currently doing in photoshop:

Using windows explorer thumbnails:
double-click the right thumbnail.
done. No waiting, as thumbs are loaded immediately.

Using a 3rd party thumnail viewer (here we go):
then right click an image file (thereby losing the content of the filename field, which in many cases is very unpractical)
start the thumbnail viewer
click the thumb you want and copy its filename (does xnview only copy the name not the extension?)
close the thumbnail viewer
focus on the filename field in the save-as dialog
paste
hit enter, or the save-as button.
done. (there's also delays for waiting for the thumbnail app to load)


This type of should happen a lot. You should be browsing images to actually use them for something, not for fun, meaning you are opening/saving from an existing app, like saving a texture from photoshop or opening a diffuse map from a 3pshader material in max (click the diffuse slot then double-click the thumbnail; super fast). This happens a lot and your 3rd party app solution does nothing to help it; rather the opposite.



Because you can't (safely, to my knowledge) replace file dialogs in windows, and because windows (recent versions) has superb thumbnail support, I now only use 3rd party thumb viewers in rare cases (and since it's a rare case, optimizing efficiency is pointless anyway).

The above should objectively demonstrate how windows explorer thumbnails are far from the "wrong" choice and are indeed very good. Just make sure you truly explore the new features in win7 instead of assuming it's like XP.

On another note xnview < irfanview, but that's another topic

My thumbnail view in windows explorer.

Very clean, minimal UI that you can customize quite a lot. Windows remembers and detects which folders are image folders and automatically switches to thumbnail view. In this setup I've enabled the preview pane. Resize thumbnails with the scroll view, realtime.

The thumbnail cache is on a SATA rev3 Crucial RealSSD C300, giving the fastest read speeds on the market; instant thumbnails.

Here the preview pane is disabled, the navigation pane enabled and thumbnails sized larger. The bar at the bottom always lists file info and file name display can be enabled.

My custom context menu:

• Convert to JPG - works on BMP and PNG as these are all I ever convert.
• Edit - Opens up the image in photoshop
• Make 720p JPG - Fits the image within 1280x720
• Copy File Name/Path - always useful. Works for all file types.

All these work in file dialogs as well as in the regular explorer.

And lastly, here's a shot of my irfanview setup, doing paintovers of games I'm not working on (it's a thing)

Dunno if you guys tried the newer Acd see pro 2.5/3.0, but having tried all, it's what i use because for me it's the best of the best. It generates thumbnails faster than Windows or windows photo gallery, and it's great for too many things, like exploring, viewing thousands of images with smooth scrolling (if you have a good mouse like logitech mx revolution you'll understand), or for making order if you are a "catalog and tag" addict.

For Raw edit is also very good.

I have it integrated in windows (associated with all the graphic formats) because for previews is faster than Vista's deafult preview, it previews in an instant. If i want to browse a folder fast, right click on the folder, and browse with Acd see pro. All is instant and i don't have a SSD Disk

Anyways, each user has his tastes, so all this i commented is personal. I have some friends using picasa :S

I personally hate irfanview

Neglected to add the most relevant image:

Image formats. These cover everything we need in production.
As you can see, the WIC system adds low-level decoding support to the operating system. It's not limited to thumbnails. Even 32 bit hdr/exr files are previewed properly,

Perna - I still don't understand how you got the tgas to show up in explorer. I'm using Win7. How do I do this?

John, http://www.fastpictureviewer.com/codecs/ $15 USD.

edit: Though I'm sure there are free TGA WIC's out there

Oh, I see. It costs money though, I was hoping there's a free option.

I was told that by installing the DirectX SDK from Microsoft, you get a .tga WIC codec too. Can't try it until tomorrow, but worth giving a shot I guess. If so, then it's a free alternative and will still display TGAs in explorer.

Mystic Thumbs + Win7 in thumbnails mode are my new favorite images browser.
With Mystic Thumbs it's possible to see the alpha in the thumbnails,all the format are readable (DDS, EXR, etc..) and the price is reasonable.

Mystic Thumbs + Irfanview is a sweet setup. Luckily I had saved a version of Mystic Thumbs when it was still free - although I might check out the paid version sometime.

Perna: Your setup looks even better though, especially the context menu options for converting formats, how did you get those? Did those options become available with FastPictureViewer?

Originally Posted by hyrumark

Perna: Your setup looks even better though, especially the context menu options for converting formats, how did you get those? Did those options become available with FastPictureViewer?

Those are my own registry edits. Now that we were on the topic I also added "Copy to clipboard" and lossless jpeg rotation (very handy for photographs). I'm planning to do a tutorial with config and reg file downloads for irfanview, thumbnails, and other windows explorer edits to get a professional-grade image handling setup. January is going to be busy, though.

That would be fantastic and much appreciated perna. I used to use an Irfanview shell extension plugin to do something similar, but it doesn't work with 64 bit explorer.

Can't wait

Older versions of the wic codec pack can be found here (freeware and donationware):
http://forums.relicnews.com/showthre...ools-1.2/page3

It only includes .tga support + camera raw formats, but at least is something :P

http://tgaviewer.com/

Originally Posted by Blaizer

Older versions of the wic codec pack can be found here (freeware and donationware):
http://forums.relicnews.com/showthre...ools-1.2/page3

It only includes .tga support + camera raw formats, but at least is something :P

Nice! Thanks for this. Helped me out a bunch.

Originally Posted by Blaizer

Older versions of the wic codec pack can be found here (freeware and donationware):
http://forums.relicnews.com/showthre...ools-1.2/page3

It only includes .tga support + camera raw formats, but at least is something :P

http://tgaviewer.com/

That's great, thanks a lot In the topic of thumbnails, I think the complete codec pack includes DDS, but do you know of any free DDS codec? I think Nvidia doesnt's work in 64 bit

I ran into a bunch of windows 7 64bit issues when it came to thumbnails and other things and created a thread about it a while back. I updated the thread as I found solutions. I got rid of irfan view because its thumbnail view was retarded and its icons for image files in list view all looked similar, I'm liking xnview much better its closer to acdsee but supports dds. All my thumbnail stuff is up and running fine like perna, I don't use the exact same workflow as him but I can see all file types. The thing that kills me at work though is windows explorer can see thumbnails fine but the fucking photoshop cs4 file open dialogue explorer inconsistently displays thumbnails, sometimes they show up other times I have the missing file type icon. Happens to everyone in the office, a real annoyance.

http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=68366

The older freeware version of Mystic Thumbs is still available.

http://www.321download.com/LastFreew...ystic%20Thumbs

Originally Posted by JostVice

That's great, thanks a lot In the topic of thumbnails, I think the complete codec pack includes DDS, but do you know of any free DDS codec? I think Nvidia doesnt's work in 64 bit

Nvidia doesn't provide a DDS thumbnail tool AFAIK, but if you want to save DDS files out of Photoshop 64bit, this might help you...
http://docs.kaneva.com/mediawiki/ind...p_DDS_Exporter

I use MysticThumbs (paid version).
It gives me everything i need and isnt that expensive...plus the support it great and bugs get fixed fast

Yep, there are older free versions of MysticThumbs floating around on the web that work in Win 7.