Viewing folder thumbnails like in XP?

I changed my folder thumbnails back to the XP style and explained how in this post:
Folder pic thumbnail preview (XP style?)

I have just the photo showing as the thumbnail, but my post in that thread is followed by another that shows how to have the photo overlay the folder icon, if you would prefer that instead.

Karlsnooks, what you posted just makes the folder icon larger with the album art (or whatever photo) still turned sideways and not very visible. The XP style allows you to view the art straight on and without an open folder taking most of the space.

blue skies said:

I changed my folder thumbnails back to the XP style and explained how in this post:
Folder pic thumbnail preview (XP style?)

I have read your post, it was kinda an inspiration to me.

During the process I did want to automate it all, since I had to customize 100s of directories; that's why I ended up using ImageMagick for converting folder.kpg to folder.ico, it's so easy to manage image files with ImageImagick from the command line, and can be easily integrated in any stupid batch script Doing that by hand, converting all of those folder.jpg one by one, would have been overkill!

robitabu said:

blue skies said:

I changed my folder thumbnails back to the XP style and explained how in this post:
Folder pic thumbnail preview (XP style?)

I have read your post, it was kinda an inspiration to me.

During the process I did want to automate it all, since I had to customize 100s of directories; that's why I ended up using ImageMagick for converting folder.kpg to folder.ico, it's so easy to manage image files with ImageImagick from the command line, and can be easily integrated in any stupid batch script Doing that by hand, converting all of those folder.jpg one by one, would have been overkill!

Yeah, it was a crazy amount of work... although I was glad when it was finished because it's so much nicer to me.

I think most people could just access the folder where their album art is stored and save all of the work involved in creating the icons. Unfortunately for me, even though I was showing hidden files and could see the location in a search, I was unable to access the images.

I'm really glad you found a much easier way to set up your thumbnails. I hope MS eventually gives us back the option to have the images as thumbnails without the open folder.

blue skies said:

I'm really glad you found a much easier way to set up your thumbnails. I hope MS eventually gives us back the option to have the images as thumbnails without the open folder.

I'm still working on that; I'd like to get a dumb-foolproof-supereasy-pipeline to get the job done.

At the time, I'm evaluating if MS Batch scripting is enough (I guess not); ImageMagick seems to be the perfect image conversion tool; the way I'm making use of desktop.ini leaves me with a couple of doubts; I'm working on a way to get the 4-items-content-folder XP look for directories storing more then one folder (with relative folder.jpg files inside); I'd like to make the containing folder look closer to the MS Seven look (but not the slanted version, I'll stay with the squared frontal view); and finally I'd like to have a context sensitive menu iten inside every MS Explorer window linked to my script so that I can launch the script whenever I like and apply my changes on the fly without even opening the command prompt window.

And then there's that hideous bug (to me is a bug!) with the icon cache that requires explorer to be killed and restarted for making it aware of those icon changes. That's something I really hate!!!

There's a lot to do, I'll take my time ... it's such a fun anyway

Maybe this post would be helpful? Windows XP Folder Icon for Windows 7

I see ... but I'm comfortable with graphics, so I'll do my own folder art by myself

I see, this is how it looked when I first only converted JPGs to ICOs but then I realized I kinda liked the way XP puts the thumbnails on a background folder image so that it's clear it's a folder and not some generic image file (I like explicit consistency when dealing with UI).

I strongly recommend people not to convert huge amounts of files one by one with some GUI-Friendly software, it's a huge waste of time. I found out spending a few ours scripting some simple batch file to do the job hands-free is an enormous time saver. I had literally 100s of folders to customize, it would have taken days!!! After finding out how to use ImageMagick to convert JPGs to ICOs and how to drive it with a Batch script, I was a happy man
Now I have two distinct script, one that customizes a single folder and another one that mass-customizes a whole folder with every (every!!!) subfolders inside. So now, converting a 1000 XP style folder.jpg previews to Seven style desktop.ini previews takes less than 2 mins and all I have to do is launch the script and let it go through the subdirectories all alone, I just stay and watch it running

I'm pretty shure you all have all those records/videos stored in a single folder and want them to be converted without the hassle to it one by one ... give it a try.

I finally moved to Bash Scripting which is far more flexible than Batch, I'm feeling more confortable with it anyway.

So now, with the help of ImageMagick and a CygWin Bash script, I can have stuff like this:


As you can see, there are folders that contain even more folders, hence the four smaller thumbnails preview (just like XP did). All again with a single script that does the job all by itself. Everyhting has been done thanks to that desktop.ini technique ... I just automated it

Only thing that still annoys me is the way Windows Seven updates its icon cache, which is frustrating :-( I really wish there had been something like the old "Refresh Preview" menu item of Windows XP.
There's something like that in Seven ... but it's really useless. After changing a folder.ico (the one I refer to in desktop.ini) content (maybe I change the image or a small detail inside), the Update menu item doesn't reflect any changes at all. Sometimes I have to completely restart Windows to make it reflect those changes, and at times not even this method helps :-(
This is a Bug!!!! Call it the way you like, to me that's a Bug :-(

Hi robitatu!

Can you please share this Bash Scripting and a short guide of how to do this XP look in windows 7?

Thank you in advance!