Viewing folder thumbnails like in XP?

[robitabu]

I'll do that in a few days, I'm working on making it less "brutal" in its approach ... it's not refined in any way, it's just a rough one, but it works and makes my life easyer

 

[sstavross]

OK friend! Whenever you are ready... I'll be waiting!

 

[robitabu]

Don't want to sound rude, but ... friend?!?!!! Do we know each other?

I'm guessing you're mediterranean, that would explain your "friendly" attitude ... well, I'm mediterranean too, but believe me when I'm saying I'm not friend to so many people I start forgetting about their names. There's a lot of confusion about friendship on the net ... f@cking f@cebook!!!

 

[sstavross]

I'm guessing you're mediterranean,

You are right, I am from Greece. And you are right too, about "friends" and "friendship" on internet. But I couldn't express my "thanks' to you more kindly, that's why I used the word "friend". It was kindly used, not literally. Believe me, I understand you in this very well! (Just for the record, I don't have a facebook page). Where are you from?

 

[robitabu]

Ok sstavross, I really didn't mention to be rude, I'm glad you got it right. I'm just fed off with all those "friend" thing around the net, it's way too much misused. I was used to take friendship seriously, now the Internet is selling it out like fried chips!

Anyway, I'm from Italy, and I'll post the script soon ... promised

 

[robitabu]

Btw, are you familiar with Bash too? I'm wondering if people here are confortable with that ... it's not broadly used in Windows, although it's a very powerful alternative to the classic DOS shell.

 

[sstavross]

No. To be honest it is the first time I heard about it in your previous posts...

 

[robitabu]

Ok, I anticipate you something about Bash before you dig into it yourself, using Bash may be frustrating at first if you have zero experience in a Linux environment, since Bash has been used primarly on Linux for years.

Nonetheless there's a project that ported a lot of GNU utils to the Windows environment, it's called Cygwin ( Cygwin Information and Installation ). I will not write down any guide to Cygwin, there's a website for that. Let's say that Cygwin is a kind of Win32 porting of a bunch of GNU utils (and a lot more!), bash included.

Bash is command line shell, you can see Bash as an "improved" version of he DOS command line shell. If you are not familiar with the DOS shell you'll feel unconfortable with Bash too.

Since I hate DOS (really, I hate it) and I'm more confortable with Bash, I tend to use Bash in Windows for scripting. I'm not a bash programmer at all, let's be clear, I don't do that for a job and I'm not pretending my script are going to be used in a production environment, but I get my things done, it's easy, it's consistent and there's a huge amount of docs around. And more importantly it works in a Windows environment pretty well thanks to Cygwin

I'd suggest you take a look at Cygwin first; it's not that fancy stuff you will expect from a typical Windows product, with glassy icons or whatever custom themes, forget it. It's fairly basic, linear, somehow geek, but believe me when I say it's powerfull!!!!

 

[sstavross]

I took a look at Cygwin. It sounds "greek" to me! I know a little DOS, but now, with 2 children and one on the way I don't have much time to study! But I'll try.
What about your script? Is it ready for posting?

 

[quantum112]

Am I missing something here?

Navigate to your music folder, then
following snips show the steps.
View attachment 111914

View attachment 111915

Yes, you're missing a lot, apparently. Not everyone's a moron who doesn't know how to do the most basic things in Windows and their problems can't be solved by typical "production-line" responses.

How about you people actually -read- the problem for a change instead of just trying to jack your post count up? How about; the "MS" way of doing things doesn't cut it for everyone? Windows 7 is full of nasty problems, it's just that the average users don't see it, and were we not forced to use it because it's the latest, we sure as heck would not.

That said, I do hope you guys manage to figure a relatively easy way of getting this to work, I absolutely hate how my album folders look right now but I'm not too keen on messing around with scripts and the like unless they're painless.

MS just needs to drop this entire freaking kernel and take a look at what made Windows XP good and build upon that, an XP 2 if you will. As I see it now 7 is nothing but a repainted Vista with more good things taken out (relative to XP) than were actually added.

I guess after around 2 years by the time users have found a way to bring all the good things from XP into Windows 7 it will actually be a useable OS, however I don't see why we should be the ones repairing what they should have done in the first place, especially when you consider how much their product costs. If I have to recode half of my OS just to get it to work how I want it to (hacking .msstyles to remove ClearType, etc.) then I shouldn't be paying MS for it in the first place.

 

[sstavross]

Hi robitatu! Any news of your script? Is it ready or you are testing it? Have a nice weekend!

 

[Morgan4000]

Hi All - Having gone to much effort selecting particular images as thumbnails on extra large folder icons (maybe 300 folders), I am now in the position where I need to carry out a fresh install of 7 whilst still retaining these folder images. The last time I attempted this, I backed up my settings first but as drives are allocated new letters on reinstall, the thumbnailcache was lost and it seems that it was too late to reassign drive letters as they were previously. I also tried restoring a backup that I made of the thumbnailcache files, but 7 wouldn't let me overwrite the files. I'm no genius with Windows but I like my folders to look nice and it really will be a chore to repeat the tidy-up! Basically, the example folder below is how I want it to look after a fresh install, i've spent some time trawling this forum and this thread is the closest I could get...

I did read that you could rename the file to display as 'folder' but there seems to be some confusion as to whether this is a solution, just wanted to double check before I do it (it will take a lot of time...)

 

[sstavross]

Hi robitatu! Happy new year!
Long time to hear from you... Are you ok?

 

[cg3001]

sstavross you still around, have you had any luck fixing this issue...robitatu was claiming he got fixed ? I also looking to find a solution to this...have you managed to figure something else about it ? cause it looks like robitatu will never come back to this forum for some unknown reason....

 

[mAlam]

Ok, I managed to get around the problem finding out a nice (but still not perfect) solution. It' still a work in progress and is not a one-click solution.

Nonetheless, it's perfect if you have 100s of directories containing music or video and you like to see related covers for each and every one in the good-old XP style (which I really prefer to the modern Seven style).

---------------------------------------------------------

Disclaimer:

Beware! I make use of a quick and dirty batch script in which I didn't write any kind of error checking; that means the script is not error proof.
I tried to be as much clean as possible and nothing inside the script is going to override or delete any file other the temporary ones it creates itself. Anyway, beware, I'm not going to be held responsible for any lost file, be carefull.

---------------------------------------------------------

The trick is to make use of Windows Seven's capabilities in using desktop.ini files to specify which icon to use as a directory thumbnail.

I created a little batch script that recursively does the following on each subdirectory inside the one it runs in:
- makes ImageMagick convert the folder.jpg file into a folder.ico file;
- creates a desktop.ini file;
- makes the directory read-only.


Step 1
I used ImageMagick ................
Step 2
Once I got a folder.ico ...............

Step 3
Last entry is needed f.......


The Batch Script

xcopy desktop.ini %1\ /h
for /r /d %%x in (*) do (
    pushd "%%x"

    convert folder.jpg .............

Syntax:
The batch script ............

Example
create_icons.bat ..........
Usage
Simply put,..................
Limits
- It does not cr.................
Pay attention
- There is no erro.............!!!

i followed your script but it's not working..
would you please help me out?