XYplorer Beta Club

My reason for using XYplorer is as a replacement for Windows Explorer, with many useful additional functions. But I've come up against a limitation to XYplorer that reverses the situation and makes Windows Explorer superior to XYplorer, at least in one key aspect: XYplorer's inability to show thumbnails of photos shot in raw format.

Is a solution to this limitation being worked on, or is this a permanent XYplorer disability, or do I need to do something special to enable raw thumbnails?

My system: Vista Home Premium.

Thanks in advance

RAW is not supported by GDI+. But if Explorer can do it there should be a way. Needs a little research...

EDIT: XY currently supports any RAW format with embedded TIFF thumbnails, e.g. NEF and DNG.

EDIT2: which RAW format are you talking about? See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAW_image_format

admin wrote:RAW is not supported by GDI+. But if Explorer can do it there should be a way. Needs a little research...

EDIT: XY currently supports any RAW format with embedded TIFF thumbnails, e.g. NEF and DNG.

EDIT2: which RAW format are you talking about? See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAW_image_format

It's "Canon" raw format, shot using a Canon PowerShot G6, the files have a ".crw" suffix. Does that help?

sklain wrote:

admin wrote:RAW is not supported by GDI+. But if Explorer can do it there should be a way. Needs a little research...

EDIT: XY currently supports any RAW format with embedded TIFF thumbnails, e.g. NEF and DNG.

EDIT2: which RAW format are you talking about? See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAW_image_format

It's "Canon" raw format, shot using a Canon PowerShot G6, the files have a ".crw" suffix. Does that help?

If Explorer can preview it, then Canon has given out the the Codec which then has been distributed with Vista. There is no principle reason why XY should not be able to use this Codec. However, it is certainly not a 10 minute coding. And there are some other things on my list first...

Just out of curiosity: if you rename the file to another extension, does the preview still work in Explorer?

admin wrote:

sklain wrote:

admin wrote:RAW is not supported by GDI+. But if Explorer can do it there should be a way. Needs a little research...

EDIT: XY currently supports any RAW format with embedded TIFF thumbnails, e.g. NEF and DNG.

EDIT2: which RAW format are you talking about? See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAW_image_format

It's "Canon" raw format, shot using a Canon PowerShot G6, the files have a ".crw" suffix. Does that help?

If Explorer can preview it, then Canon has given out the the Codec which then has been distributed with Vista. There is no principle reason why XY should not be able to use this Codec. However, it is certainly not a 10 minute coding. And there are some other things on my list first...

Just out of curiosity: if you rename the file to another extension, does the preview still work in Explorer?

I tried substituting both TIF and JPG for CRW and it made no difference: no thumbnail.

Hm, i have one crw here and Win Explorer shows not thumbnail of it. Most of my images are shot with a Canon 400D where the raw files are cr2 files. For cr2 i don't see thumbnails, too.

For me that is not a problem, because i automatically convert raw files to dng while downloading from the memory card. Maybe that is a workaround for you, sklain?

Hi there,

I shoot in raw CR2 format and question why one would want XY to decode these? Yes it has a small advantage on occasion but once you go down the road of raw formats there are so many types and more coming out with new cameras. The solution is to use a decent raw program which is why presumably, you shoot in raw in the first place. I use Bibble and it decodes virtually all the known camera formats and obviously provides all the further processing features required to develop the format into jpg or tiff.

So, for raw formats I think XY is not the most suitable tool, if it can decode them fine but not essential in my view.

sklain wrote:

admin wrote:...Just out of curiosity: if you rename the file to another extension, does the preview still work in Explorer?

I tried substituting both TIF and JPG for CRW and it made no difference: no thumbnail.

I meant in Explorer...

graham wrote:I shoot in raw CR2 format and question why one would want XY to decode these? Yes it has a small advantage on occasion but once you go down the road of raw formats there are so many types and more coming out with new cameras.

So, for raw formats I think XY is not the most suitable tool, if it can decode them fine but not essential in my view.

My camera isn't fancy enough to do raw, but I agree with graham here, as to provide for all the various new and funky formats using unique coding could be a never-ending challenge, but IF the formats can be handled via some common interface, then it would make it more of a reasonable idea.
If the raw format has a embedded TIFF thumbnail or similar, they would seem to be more likely to be within XY's scope.

One should give this tweak a try:
Might be GDI under Vista is clever enough to use the Codec...

admin wrote:

sklain wrote:

admin wrote:...Just out of curiosity: if you rename the file to another extension, does the preview still work in Explorer?

I tried substituting both TIF and JPG for CRW and it made no difference: no thumbnail.

I meant in Explorer...

Even after changing the CRW extension in Explorer to either JPG or TIF the thumbnail continued to be visible. Does this help?

sklain wrote:

admin wrote:

sklain wrote:

admin wrote:...Just out of curiosity: if you rename the file to another extension, does the preview still work in Explorer?

I tried substituting both TIF and JPG for CRW and it made no difference: no thumbnail.

I meant in Explorer...

Even after changing the CRW extension in Explorer to either JPG or TIF the thumbnail continued to be visible. Does this help?

Thanks for testing, it might help a little once I begin to implement this.

admin wrote:Thanks for testing, it might help a little once I begin to implement this.

Thanks. This will be a help, probably to more people than just myself.

To answer comments made above that there are other ways to view Raw files: Of course, and I use Cannon's ZoomBrowser EX or Photoshop Elements to view individual Raw files that are on my hard disk, and the latter to process them. But the advantage of XYplorer is to be able to view all file types -- surely there's no advantage to excluding particular file types such as raw, especially if including them isn't a big issue.

Since the above exchange of messages, I've stopped using XYplorer and gone back to using Windows Explorer, which does display thumbnails for Canon "CRW" raw files. I've just updated XYplorer to the most recent version in the hope that this problem has meanwhile been "fixed". Unfortunately, not.

I used to use XYplorer constantly, but since this problem came up I've had to return to cludgy old Windows Explorer, with XYplorer remaining unused. It seems strange to me that Windows Explorer can show my raw files while XYplorer can't.

Oh, well. Guess I can't have everything.

sklain wrote:I used to use XYplorer constantly, but since this problem came up I've had to return to cludgy old Windows Explorer, with XYplorer remaining unused.

You're telling me that you don't have any other file types besides these problem ones on your sys that XY could be easily used for? I can understand not using it for RAW but for TXT, DOC, PDF, etc, and such, XY still is so much better than WE that I can't see why you leave XY unused...I personally still use WE for a handful of things, and even xplorer2 om rare occasion, but XY for 95+% of the file mngr tasks.