Photoshop thumbnails and CS4

[davidc1815]

I have been installing PS7 to get PSD thumbnails to show their image (rather than a generic icon) in Windows. I understand this facility was dropped in CS. Does anyone know if this has been restored in CS4 or will I have to continue to install PS7 before CS4?

Thanks.

[Chris Cox]

As I already said: the Microsoft API is broken. For one thing it leaves files open and fails to close them, so you get complaints about "the file is open or in use" when you shouldn't. Adobe cannot always work around something that is broken at the OS/Explorer level.

[BobLevine]

Chris, out of curiosity, is this still the case with Vista?

Bob

[Chris Cox]

Yep, the bug is in Vista, too.

[Guest]

jj, you hear that?

[Guest]

> the Microsoft API is broken.

And has been for years and wasn't restricted to the psicon.dll file. It was the case with aiicon as well. I'm sure there were more.

Acusing Adobe of not working with what MS has out there, in this case, is like saying because they make the fuel pump the truck with broken axles should be drivable.

[_Koogle_]

Profanity laced post deleted by forum host

[BobLevine]

One more post like that I'll kill your access to this forum.

This is a professional forum and the use of profanity is a violation of the TOS you agreed to.

Bob

[_Koogle_]

so long as you got the message... pass it on yeah.

[_Brandon_Paddock_]

Chris et al -

Which API and supposed bug are you referring to?

If you use IInitializeWithStream for your thumbnail provider, that will help prevent your code from messing up others trying to access the file. Just don't leak any references to the stream.

If you are having the shell initialize your handler with a file path / IShellItem / pidl, and having problems properly managing access to the file, you should let me know and I'll do my best to help you (or get you in touch with our platform PM who I know would be happy to help you out).

Blaming your bugs on the OS is so tacky =P

Thanks,
Brandon Paddock
http://brandonlive.com

[Wolf Eilers]

>Blaming your bugs on the OS ...

Aha, a Microsoft techie is challenging an Adobe techie to a dual. I'm sitting on the sidelines with interest. :)

[_Brandon_Paddock_]

Sorry didn't mean for that to sound so snarky, just trying to help out! :)

[PECourtejoie]

Welcome, Brandon, thanks for offering a helping hand! I'm wondering: is it Mark Hamburg that suggested Microsoft Employees to show up in here?
Having Icons of Photoshop files in Explorer is sure part of our User Experience!

[Guest]

> Having Icons of Photoshop files in Explorer is was sure part of our User Experience!

Fixed that for you Pierre! ;)

[Guest]

[PECourtejoie]

mmmh, not exactly, John, rather "Having Icons of Photoshop files in Explorer that would not lock files would sure be part of our User Experience!"

[Guest]

If you put it that way, I quite agree!

Even with a decent Bridge, that starts up in <1 second now, and is correspondingly quick in operation, it would be nice not to see those ugly generic icons in Windows.

[Guest]

I have found Bridge CS4 a vast improvement over the CS3 version, I actually use it now. I had to use Bridge 2 to get any work done.

[Chris Cox]

Brandon - I don't have the code handy now. We tried a few different techniques, and in every case the MS code called before our code was leaving the file marked as busy. Basically, it's a bug we can't work around.

[_Brandon_Paddock_]

Chris - There aren't any known bugs like that in Explorer, and we'd surely know about them if there were (after all, the dozens of in-box thumbnail handlers use the same APIs, as do Office and countless other third parties).

Most likely a bug in your code was leaking something that caused the behavior you saw. The pre-Vista API for providing thumbnails (IExtractImage) was a bit less than straight-forward so I'm not surprised that some developers ran into issues getting it working properly.

However, in Vista the new IThumbnailProvider API is extremely simple and very easy to implement, with some great samples available in the Windows SDK and easy to follow tutorials on MSDN. It even supports out-of-proc implementations so you don't have to worry about destabilizing the shell and can even write them in .NET.

Details about building a thumbnail provider can be found here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc144118(VS.85).aspx

If you have an implementation that appears to be causing problems with file locking and such, please let me know. It would be very helpful to share that with my team so we can figure out what the cause of your problem is.

Thanks,
Brandon

[_Derrick_Moore_]

Brandon, I was about to say 'why weren't you around here when Photoshop 7
was out?' but after looking at the picture on your blog you probably weren't
even alive ;)

[Guest]

Can't say fairer than that!

[Chris Cox]

Brandon - the bugs are still outstanding with Microsoft, but we've stopped pressing for fixes and moved on. Other apps have seen the same bugs, with completely independent implementations - which is why other apps have also dropped their thumbnailing explorer extensions (or continue to live with "file is busy or in use", which you still see from the MS provided thumbnailers).

And we have to write code to support XP and Vista, so we can't use just the latest Vista APIs (assuming they worked correctly, but they don't).

[_Brandon_Paddock_]

Chris - I work on the Explorer team. If you have a specific bug to report please do so, but none of the in-box handlers have such problems, and none of the APIs have known issues. Repeating that claim won't make it true!

As part of the Windows 7 Beta SDK release we're doing a big push to get developers with file formats to implement a complete set of format handlers. That includes things like thumbnail handlers, preview handlers, property handlers, and IFilters (for files with textual content). The Win7 Beta SDK will include a tool we demo'd at PDC that will run a series of tests against your file format's handlers and report what is missing or where common issues/bugs are found. This tool might be of help to you in ensuring a great experience for your Windows users working with your file formats like PSD.

As I said, we'd love to have Adobe provide a full set of handlers including thumbnails for PSD. In fact, in Vista or later you don't even need to implement a thumbnail handler, you can have a property handler that returns the thumbnail via the PKEY_Thumbnail property. If your format already includes a lower-res thumbnail image embedded in it, it can't get much easier than that.

Now if you don't want to or don't have the time to implement proper support for your format, that's your call. And while I know you probably have lots of users running XP and will for a while still, I'm betting your Vista and Win7 users would be grateful if you added such support using one of the Vista mechanisms.

Brandon

[Guest]

Brandon,

As an Explorer team man please reveal how we can get the size and view settings of Explorer Windows to stick permanently. Nothing seems to work; not even clicking the close button with modifier keys. And it's just as bad in Vista!

Edit: Sorry for the OT excursion, this has bugged me since Windows 3.0. :(

[_Brandon_Paddock_]

Hey John,

On Vista and XP, window sizes are stored on a per-folder basis. So if you open Computer, resize it, and then close it - it should be the same size when you open it again. But if you open Documents, that may be a different size (the size you last closed Documents at, or the default). Modifier keys have never done anything special when pressing the close button - no idea where that rumor got started.

There's also been a bug for a while that could cause Explorer to "forget" view settings for some folders, basically a corruption bug in the persisted settings data. We finally were able to track this down and made a fix for this in Vista SP2 (and Win7).

Also, the Explorer window size behavior seems to have changed for Win7, as the Explorer now opens at the last size and position it was closed at, no matter what folder location you open to.