Adobe disabled thumbnails because it caused errors and had potential for data loss. Adobe blamed the bug on Microsoft, saying that a fault in Explorer API would cause files to stay open, given the “file in use or already open” error. There was a thread on Adobe Forums recently where the issue came up, and Brandon Paddock of the Windows Explorer Team said that there were no known bugs in the API and offered help on the issue. The Adobe engineer on the board admitted that the problem had been going on for so long that they put it on the back burner. i doubt it means anything for thumbnails in XP or Vista, but hey, we’ll see.

On a more positive note, due to some changes in Windows 7, if a format embeds a low res image, it’s possible to use that as the thumbnail. We may see those thumbnails return in Windows 7, along with thumbnails for a lot of other apps such as The GIMP.

Initially it was just a workaround to the thumbnail issue, but now i use the Adobe Bridge application for handling all files that went into or came out of Photoshop, whether they were JPEGS, raws from my camera, PSDs, etc. It’s basically explorer for Photoshop, so i keep it open all the time.

Of course, you could also get a Mac. They have full-res thumbnails. :)

Has anyone made a hack to Explorer to make Explorer show thumbnails of these formats? How about in Win7?

Dels mentioned ArtWeaver in the 1st comment. I decided to take a look at it and downloaded the portable zip package (release 0.5.7).

I unzipped it and then went to execute it. At that point I got a message from Comodo BOCLEAN that the exe file contained the Backdoor.Win32.Pahador trojan (details here: http://www.threatexpert.com/report.aspx?uid=9a288acd-8424-4941-bdba-18125ff09210)

I immediately sent a note to the author and asked if he thought this might be a false positive?

But soon after sending the email, the downloads for ArtWeaver went offline. As of right now, 2 days later, I have not had a response from the author to my email and the downloads are still offline.

Since I still had the zip file, I was curious if BOCLEAN trapped this trojan first ahead of AVG Free 8.x (which did not pop up any message when I tried to run the program). I unzipped the exe file again and then had AVG scan it. It did not find anything! Hmm.

So I ran it through VirusTotal and they did not find anything (using 38 programs). So looks like this could be a false positive. But then why has the author not responded to my email and why are his download links still not working???

I will send the file onto Comodo and tell them I think it may be a false positive. But still, I am hesitant to try this program now.

Regarding saving your history, i know all versions of Photoshop from CS (version 8) will let you save your history in the document’s metadata, to a separate file, or both. As best i can tell, it’s not possible in The GIMP.

As an aside, I always create a copy for editing.

Speaking of history, what would be very useful would be to be able to get a history list of the changes you have made to a photo. Maybe be able to trap the list and save it in the properties of the photo. Does any photo editing program offer this?

For this reason, i recommend anytime you start start image editing software with an existing image to ALWAYS make a copy of that image on a separate layer and work off the copy. The easy way to do this is to take the current layer and drop it on the icon that looks like two stacked photos. This way, if you more mistakes than your history will allow you to undo, you can go back to that original.

Also, if you look in the Layers palette/window, the current layer will be highlighted. Clicking on the eye will hide or show the layer. It does get confusing at times, especially when you have dozens of layers, but it’s a very flexible system that allows you to separate parts of an image. Once you start thinking with layers in mind, you can visualize what items go where and what layer.

The problem with Gimp is that it have too many windows, is confusing and you always have to moving around them everytime you close and start to edit another pic.

All-in-one single window is more friendly user.

If the developers would copypaste the PS interface it would much be better for the final user.

And I don’t see why some of you comment on the badness of GIMP.

If you’re not liking this program, why did you read this post in the first place ?

The autor warned you in the title.

:-)

My tip is, I prefer to dock the layers colours and brush etc tabs at the bottom of the main toolbox palette. Meaning I have the one toolset window with all the information available in tabs, and then the rest of my screen space is for the image window.

I’ll get a screenshot up if this doesn’t make sense to anyone.

But the main thing is it depends on the user preferences and experience. There’s a lot of awesome artwork over the internet created only using GIMP or inkscape so there should be not excuse over the UI.

If there is interest then I could invest a few hours in completing it.

I believe there was a menu bar in the main window prior to 2.6 because that is all I ever use.

Whenever I have experimented with the toolbox items, 90% of the time, I can’t figure out what they do. The Gimp help in the past has been poor (it would be nice if they had context sensitive help).

Like your example using the Crop command above. What the hell is “Allow growing” for? Or “Expand from center”? Why do I need these? These commands aren’t intuitively obvious and it takes too much effort to open up the help and try to figure out what they are trying to communicate. Same complaint for many (all?) of the toolbox commands.

And I don’t understand layering. How do you take an existing photo and make layers out of it? How do you know what layer you are on?

Btw as Windows user i would suggest to take ArtWeaver as Photoshop alternate, it’s free and have much more interface of old days Photoshop (PS 7)