Adobe CS2 and the Case of the Disappearing Thumbnails!
by Alex Walker
For all its unquestionable power, Adobe Creative Suite 2 certainly has a number of irritating habits.
Number
#1 with a bullet on my list has been its deliberate disabling of
thumbnail views of Illustrator and Photoshop native files.
‘Pre-CS’
versions of both programs did an excellent job of providing a quick
refresher of what each file contained, but with the birth of CS (and
suspiciously enough, Adobe Bridge which DOES give you full
thumbnails) all PSD, EPS and AI files suddenly reverted to being
displayed as nothing more than blithe little icons in Windows Explorer.
Welcome to 1999.
Figuring this was probably something that had been disabled rather than removed, Matt spent a little time researching the issue this afternoon, and thanks to some outstanding work by Mike Golding and Stewart Whaley, here are the findings.
In
short, the issue is solvable. This solution does, however require you
to make some registry changes and install a couple of DLLs. It also
assumes you installed CS2 in it’s default folders.
However be
warned: playing with the registry is a dark, dangerous art, properly
understood only by great wizards and the clinically insane. Basically,
we can’t guarantee you won’t turn your PC into a large blancmange.
However, if you’re feeling brave (or you just really like blancmange), here are the instructions.
- Download this file to a temporary folder.
- Shut down all Adobe programs.
- Set a ’system return point’ to allow you to rollback the changes should anything go wrong (if your system supports it).
- Unzip it to ‘C:\Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\Shell’. You could quite likely already have either of the DLL files. No matter.
- Run ‘aiicon.dll.reg’ by double clicking it.
- Run ‘psicon.dll.reg’ by double clicking it.
That
should do it. If you can’t smell smoke right now it probably worked. To
be fair, we’ve had no problems at all, and it’s worked faultlessly
everytime. Memories of long past registry meltdowns die hard though.
source :
http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2005/12/13/adobe-cs2-and-the-case-of-the-disappearing-thumbnails/
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