Add the Ability to View Thumbnails of PSD Files in Windows Explorer

If you work with Adobe Photoshop, even half as much as you say you do.. I’m sure by now you may have noticed that you are unable to view  thumbnails of PSD files in Windows Explorer. For some unknown reason, Adobe has decided it’s best to just remove this particular functionality for Photoshop users. How amazingly thoughtful of them.

So, if you’re like me and decide you don’t want to have to open a Photoshop, or the Adobe browser, everytime you want to view a thumbnail of a PSD file.. read on.

Here’s a quick, and easy, method of  adding the ability to view thumbnails of .psd files without opening (or heck, even installing!) Adobe Photoshop.

  1. First, you need to download the necessary PSD Thumbnail Shell DLL file.
  2. UnZip the psdthumbnaildll.zip file you just downloaded, and copy that file to C:\Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\Shell\ (if it doesn’t exist yet, create it).
  3. Download and run this registry file. It will add the necessary changes to your registry to allow the Shell to access the new Adobe DLL.
  4. Restart your system.
  5. PSD THUMBNAILS!

Comments 18

  1. Hey, what’s up Ian! How are things?

    This tip works great on Windows 7. Which btw, totally rules, as I’m sure you know. I run it on all of my personal systems at the moment. Although, I still have to keep an XP machine around for several development programs that don’t support Vista/Win7.

    You also have to restart your system after adding the registry changes, which I just added to the list of steps above.

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  4. Tested and working on Windows 7 32-bit using Photoshop CS5. Considering the .dll file comes from Photoshop 7, it makes sense to always save .psd files using maximum compatibility.

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