I have Photoshop CS4, which will open .psd files (Photoshop’s native format) but when I open a folder in Windows Explorer and set the “View” to “Large Icons” I get thumbnails for all of my jpegs and this and that, but all the .psd files show up with the Photoshop logo and no image. Is there anything I can do to make it show thumbnails? I have a buttload of numerically named images where the filename gives no clue as to what the image is…
Thanks for your time.
Adobe doesn’t include an explorer viewer in amy of its newer Photoshop products, so you’ll have to get it elsewhere. Microsoft includes one with a certain software program, but it only works for 32-bit Windows. After hunting through some support forums, I found this little bit of freeware called SageThumbs that works in 64-bit Windows, but I’ve only just tested it. Note that it will install quite a few other file extensions, too, and you may not have viewers for all of them. You can’t just install the ones you want.
Remember, neither option actually uses Photoshop to render these, so you’re at the mercy of someone else’s implementation. So far SageThumbs seems to be doing okay.
I have 32 bit Windows… I’ll check that program out–thanks!
I just went to download that software from the link you gave, but it says it’s for Windows 7. I have Vista 
That’s odd. Both links say they will work on Vista, too. In fact, the SageThumbs claims to work on all versions of Windows since Windows 2000.
Also, perhaps I should have been more clear about the SageThumbs link: it works with both 32-bit and 64-bit Windows. And it does let you disable it for certain file formats, plus includes the ability to convert to the most common formats. It’s pretty nice.
In short, I recommend using SageThumbs for your needs.
Ah ok I didn’t look at that link since it said 64 bit. I’ll try it out when I get home. It would be very nice to be able to see what those files are!! I wonder why they aren’t natively shown? I mean, if you have Paint Shop Pro installed you can see thumbnails of .psp files, which are a proprietary format–why not Photoshop?
Anyway, thanks for the tip. I’ll let you know how it works out.
That’s odd, long ago - I think before XP, certainly before thumbnail view came out, I noticed .psd files used their picture as the icon. I thought that was very smart. Did that stop working now? Or is thumbnail view not working because it’s trying to make thumbnails, whereas icon view works?