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:

Download Microsoft Expression Blend 3.0 (3.0.1927.0 7/20/2009) Trial: Link
Using 7-Zip, open ‘Blend_Trial_en.exe’ from step (1) and in the ‘Setup’ subfolder, open ‘BlImp.cab’ then extract ‘PSDCodec.dll’
Download the Visual C++ 2008 SP1 Redistributable Package (x86): 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.

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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.

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The system works by assigning thumbnail icons to every image in the active folder which are then available independently of the view mode that the user has selected for the folder. When I read about the thumbnail image generator I had fears that it would slow down the system but this is apparently not the case since the application only becomes active when a user opens a folder that contains images.

Image icons are stored in a thumbnail cache that is set to keep 2000 thumbnail images with a size of 31 Megabytes. The size of the image icons cache can be changed, the maximum is 10000 thumbnails with a size of 156 Megabytes.

The cache can be cleared or disabled in the settings as well. They also contain the option to disable thumbnail generation. The settings can be accessed from the Windows Control Panel which is a bit unusual.

The program can be uninstalled easily which will also clear the icon cache leaving no traces of the application on the system. The application is compatible with Windows 98, ME, 2000 and Windows XP and supports the most popular image formats (JPG, JPE, JPEG, JP2, J2K, GIF, PNG, BMP, WBMP, EMF, WMF, PCX, PBM, PGM, PNM, PPM, RAS, TIF, TIFF, and TGA.)

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This can be checked easily by trying to play the video with Windows Media Player or any other media player that does not use binary codecs. Five output sets are available that define all sorts of parameters like the number of thumbnails per row, the background color and the width and / or height of the thumbnails.

Everything in there can be changed and there is much to explore including several options that I have not mentioned.

Several videos can be added to the program queue by either selecting a folder or files from the system. Two output settings exist. The first creates an image for every thumbnail while the second combines all thumbnails into an image.

The creation process itself is fast and works flawlessly as long as a supported codec is installed. I ran into a bit of problems with several video files because I use SMPlayer as my main video player which uses binary codecs that other applications cannot use. This meant that I received quite a few “failed” messages because of missing codecs.

Installing the codec would naturally resolve the problem.

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Each image is represented as a jpg image in the thumbs.db file which makes it relatively easy to extract those images again. The thumbnails are stored in a centralized location in Windows Vista with the name thumbcache_xxx.db where xxx is a number between 1 and 999. That folder is located at %sysroot%\Users\Owner\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer.

A flexible small tool that can extract all images from thumbs.db files is Thumbs Extract. It’s a command line utility and the command is ThumbsExtract.exe path to thumbs.db, for example ThumbsExtract.exe c:\thumbs.db if the file is located on the c:\ drive.

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HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer

Select Edit – New – Dword Value and name it ThumbnailSize. Double-click the new entry and select decimal and a number between 32 and 256. The default value for the thumbnail size is 100, if you would like a bigger size increase the number above 100, if you like smaller ones choose one below 100.

The new settings will become active after you restart your system.

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