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View Photoshop PSD thumbnails in Vista and Windows 7 Explorer

Martin Brinkmann — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 16:55:31 +0000

Windows Vista introduced a new imaging stack, called Windows Imaging Component (WIC), and uses it in Windows Explorer to create thumbnails for most image file formats. 3rd parties can write their own WIC codec to support proprietary image formats such as Nikon NEF or Canon CR2 raw files and Windows Explorer is able to show thumbnails for those files when the corresponding codec is installed. Microsoft maintain a page containing links to existing codecs.

Sadly, there is no publicly available codec for the Photoshop PSD format but the newly released Microsoft Expression Blend 3 design tool (which, by the way, is nothing short of amazing for WPF and Silverlight design) includes such a codec so installing Blend 3 automatically installs the PSD codec. For those who don’t have a need for Blend and don’t want to install it, here is a little hacking guide to extract the codec (a 256KB dll) and use it separately:

Get the codec and its dependencies:

Link

7-Zip

Link

Codec installation:

Install the VC++ Runtime by running vcredist_x86.exe from step (3) above.

Copy PSDCodec.dll from step (2) to some location on the harddisk, e.g. “C:\Program Files\PSDCodec”

Register the codec from an administrator’s command prompt by running the following command: regsvr32 “C:\Program Files\PSDCodec\PSDCodec.dll”

That’s it, Windows Vista Explorer should soon begin to display thumbnails for all PSD files that were saved from Photoshop with the “Maximum Compatibility” option. As a side effect, WIC-aware image viewers such as FastPictureViewer Professional (http://www.fastpictureviewer.com) automatically benefit from the codec installation and uses it to open and display the same PSD files with full fidelity.

Display Full Images That Are Posted As Links Or Thumbnails

Martin Brinkmann — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 08:44:40 +0000

Chance is you have already stumbled upon a few websites that are posting images as links or thumbnails. The only way to view the full images would be to click on the links to be taken to another page or website where the images are then displayed in their normal resolution. The majority of users might have experienced those links on web forums, directories or blog posts.

Unlinker is a Firefox add-on that can display full images on the very same pages the image links or thumbnails have been posted thus eliminating the need to click on the images to view them in full resolution. There are two ways to make the add-on work after installation. It integrates itself in the right-click menu of the Firefox web browser. Users who want to view the full sized images on the active page may therefor right-click on that page and select the Unlinker option from the menu.

The second option is to customize one of the toolbars of the Firefox web browser and drag and drop the Unlinker add-on on one of them to be able to access the functionality with a left-click as well.

Unlinker is available for the Firefox web browser. It can be directly downloaded from the Mozilla Firefox add-on repository.

Create Image Thumbnails In Windows Explorer

Martin Brinkmann — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 16:12:41 +0000

It is not only web designers who need to create image thumbnails regularly. There are many situations where image thumbnails come in handy starting from blogging and publishing websites to PowerPoint presentations or preview images of a photo collection. Some programs and online scripts – like WordPress for instance – create image thumbnails automatically whenever the user uploads an image to the web server. Some however do not have that option which means that the user has to create the thumbnails manually.

One interesting application for that purpose is RightThumb for the Windows operating system. It is a portable application that can be integrated into the Windows Explorer context menu to offer the option to create a thumbnail from selected images.

Several parameters of the thumbnail creation can be configured upon startup including the output format for the thumbnail image, the maximum dimension for the image, the quality of jpg images, compression of png images, the resample filter and if desired a prefix identifier for the image. The image will be automatically sharpened after resizing and it is possible to select a different output folder for the thumbnail image.

The program can be closed after the initial configuration and is from then on accessible from the Windows context menu if that option has been selected. Right Thumb (via Barry’s Computer Tips) is a free download for the windows operating system.