Folder pic thumbnail preview (XP style?)

Is there a way to make the folder icons look like the windows XP folder icons, where the folders are flat instead of skewed, and showed 1 to 4 picture thumbnails? Its awfully difficult for someone like me who has a huge amount of categorization to find what he is looking for due to the lack of functionality that the folder thumbnails have in this version of Windows. Yeah, sure they look all pretty, but its difficult to even figure out what the general picture contents of the folder is unless you're already very familiar with it. Any help would be appreciated.

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/77626-convert-windows-xp-style.html
maybe this you means.

No way till date

Manick2005 said:

Is there a way to make the folder icons look like the windows XP folder icons, where the folders are flat instead of skewed, and showed 1 to 4 picture thumbnails? Its awfully difficult for someone like me who has a huge amount of categorization to find what he is looking for due to the lack of functionality that the folder thumbnails have in this version of Windows. Yeah, sure they look all pretty, but its difficult to even figure out what the general picture contents of the folder is unless you're already very familiar with it. Any help would be appreciated.

Click to expand...

I would love to be able to do this also. Does anyone know of a fix for this? The slanted Windows 7 folder thumbnails are super annoying. Especially when it shows more than one slanted picture as part of the thumbnail, obscuring the actual picture you want to be able to see.

Here is thread about it on the microsoft forum: XP Style folder thumbnails

So, last week, I ended up going through the very time-consuming exercise of converting my icons for my music folders and some of my document folders to full, flat, beautiful icon pictures rather than the slanted picture-in-a-folder Windows 7 icons. They look so much better, and my files are so much easier to find!

For my music files, I had the extra step of going to Amazon or a similar site and grabbing the album cover art. I should have been able to find the hidden folder where Windows 7 is supposed to store the album art, but for some reason, even after checking "show hidden files" I still couldn't find the folder. That would have saved me quite a lot of time.

When I first started to make the icons for the folders, I used this online converter to make the .ico - ConvertICO.com - Convert .PNG format files to .ICO or .ICO format files to .PNG : Windows Vista compatible icons

It worked great, but would not convert a .jpg so I had an additional step of using FastStone Image Viewer to convert the JPEGs into PNG files.

Once the .ico files were made, I had to right-click properties to "open folder location". Once there, I could right click the folder, choose properties and "customize" and change the option, browsing to select the appropriate .ico picture.

Just this one small portion of the icon changing task took 11 clicks (once I was at the folder location) to set up and apply the changes. For each folder!

Eventually I found the free program called IcoFX IcoFX - Free software downloads and software reviews - CNET Download.com which allowed me to make .ICOs from JPEGs, saving me the step of having to convert to PNG files first, which the online converter required.

As I was going through all this trouble... I started to wonder if I was crazy for doing it... but it looks so much better and is much more functional for me. So yep, it was worth it. For me anyway.

This post has a PhotoShopped picture of flat icons compared to the slanted folder kind http://www.sevenforums.com/337512-post1.html but really the difference is much more pronounced because, not only is the album art photo in the Windows 7 style slanted, which makes it difficult to see, additionally the photo is only about a third of the size of a flat icon photo even when they are all set to the same relative size, because the folder takes up so much of the space.

So right now, I have my music library showing 10 albums per row across my screen and the album arts are huge. But if I had 10 albums per row with the Windows 7 folder style, the album arts would be tiny. And slanted.