imageswindows 7windows-explorer
I have several images on my computer some of them are in special image formats like .hdr, .exr, .tif. WIndows shows thumbnails previews for common image formats only, e.g .jpg, .png. How can I get thumbnail previews for the special image formats as well?
Checking Always show icons, never thumbnails (in the folder options menu you see in the asker's screenshot), applying, unchecking and applying again, solved the problem for me.
Edit 9-12-2014: Additionally, if you go to Advanced system settings and enter the Performance settings tab, ensure that Save taskbar thumbnail previews and Show thumbnails instead of icons are selected in the available check boxes. This affects all folders globally, rather than doing it for each folder.
In order to get your thumbnails working again, you have to uninstall Java 8. It is funny, but true. For me, only the uninstalling of Java 8 helped; images were shown instantly afterwards. I tried a lot of different things before, given things by several forum discussions. After fixing the issue, you can install Java again, of course.
Best Answer
While SageThumbs or XnView work well, they are overkill (in terms of disk space, memory, and CPU usage) for just showing
.hdrfile thumbnails. For that, you only need one small (56 kB) DLL from Microsoft:Download the (enormous, half-gigabyte) DirectX SDK from Microsoft.
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=6812
Run the installer and install only the Utilities. (This requires the Runtime to be installed, too.)
Copy the file
TxView.dllfrom theUtilities\bin\x64directory in the DX SDK directory into\Windows\System32\.x32directory instead.From the command-line:
That's it! You can now delete the remaining 142MB of Utilities installed by the SDK. You don't even need to restart Windows Explorer, just F5 in a folder with .hdr files and you'll see thumbnails for them!