3D Thumbnails

Post by **ceashure** » Sat May 19, 2012 2:01 pm

Creates thumbnails for all your MPO, JPS, and PNS 3d files. This is not a "viewer", but simply a way to see your images in Windows explorer. I got really tired of applications (like sview) just putting default icons as the thumbnails for all my 3D files. So I decided to create my own application that would generate the JPS, MPO, and PNS Thumbnails for me.

Version 1.2 Beta:
Windows Vista, 7, 8 (x86 & x64):
http://gamingvibe.com/media/3DImageThumbnails_Setup.exe

Note: This will NOT work on Windows XP or below. Windows XP uses a different API to generate thumbnail image cache.

Enjoy!

Update 8/31/2013:
v1.2
*Choice between Side-by-side or Single Image thumbnails during install
*Improved MPO thumbnail to output Side-by-side format
*Converted to .NET backend
*Works on both x86 and x64 (no separate installers)

Update 5/22/2012:
v1.1
*Now Supports: MPO, JPS, and PNS
*Renamed from JPS Thumbnail Viewer to 3D Image Thumbnails

Post by **cybereality** » Sat May 19, 2012 5:55 pm

Cool.

Post by **ceashure** » Sun May 20, 2012 10:42 am

I'm having a hard time finding any MPO or PNS files, and I'd like to add support for them. Does anyone have a few of these files they don't mind sharing?

Post by **cybereality** » Sun May 20, 2012 1:18 pm

Sure thing.

Post by **ceashure** » Tue May 22, 2012 5:07 pm

Thanks Cyber!

I've updated the links above with the new thumbnail provider.

v1.1
*Now Supports: MPO, JPS, and PNS
*Renamed from JPS Thumbnail Viewer to 3D Image Thumbnails

Post by **Zloth** » Thu May 24, 2012 10:11 pm

HANDY! I checked it with all three formats and it worked fine. Icons now work AND the preview pane works as well.

Thanks Ceashure!

Post by **vatavian** » Sat Jun 09, 2012 7:49 am

I have been wishing for this for a while and this works great! I just now created an account here so I could thank you for this. I think icons would be a little better if they were just one half of the image, but I am quite happy with it as it works now.

Post by **cybereality** » Sat Jun 09, 2012 12:34 pm

Wow! It works. Thanks.

Post by **ase69s** » Wed Sep 05, 2012 3:33 am

Thanks for the app but i installed it and it didnt generate any thumbnails (cleared thumbnail cache and rebooted too after installing...with no results), I took a look at its program files folder and its only a .dll (i suppose that is a dll handler for generating those file extension thumbnails) so i dont know if i have to do something more after installing it...

Months ago in some website I saw that this could be done directly thinkering with the registry in the case of the jps (so it showed the thumbnails as a jpg) but i dont remember where

Post by **ceashure** » Wed Sep 05, 2012 6:44 am

Hmm. What OS are you running? Do you have any other programs or registry entries you think might be conflicting?

The first thing I would try is uninstalling, and re-installing. The dll may not have registered correctly with windows or the registry.

Post by **ase69s** » Wed Sep 05, 2012 8:17 am

Ups, sorry for not including that...its a Windows 7 x64, i didnt installed anything to preview jps files or touched the registry yet so i think there shouldn't be any conflicts...

Apart from reinstalling (in case it changes nothing) any way to check the dll is not registering correctly?any registry key or system log to check?

Post by **peterj** » Mon Oct 08, 2012 11:02 pm

hi ceashure, i have the same problem as ase69s: I installed the 64bit version on Win7 64 bit, ran disk cleanup to clear thumbnail cache, reboot and still nothing happens, as if nothing was installed although I can see the .dll there in Program Files... any ideas?

Post by **ceashure** » Tue Oct 09, 2012 6:50 am

peterj wrote:hi ceashure, i have the same problem as ase69s: I installed the 64bit version on Win7 64 bit, ran disk cleanup to clear thumbnail cache, reboot and still nothing happens, as if nothing was installed although I can see the .dll there in Program Files... any ideas?

I'm wondering if it needs to run as administrator? Can you try that and report back?

Second thing to try (but not recommended, as the installer should do this) run this from cmd prompt:
regsvr32 c:\path\to\that\dll\file\filename.dll

Post by **peterj** » Wed Oct 10, 2012 12:28 am

hi ceashure, ase69s, I tried installing on two other Win7 PCs in the house (one x64 and one x86) and it worked on both of those so I got down to examining the registry entries and found a fix:

1. Run regedit
2. Delete the .jps key from HKCR
3. Delete the .jps key from HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\FileExts
4. Logout/Login
5. Reinstall 3DImageThumbnails_x64_Setup

Post by **ceashure** » Wed Oct 10, 2012 7:46 am

peterj wrote:hi ceashure, ase69s, I tried installing on two other Win7 PCs in the house (one x64 and one x86) and it worked on both of those so I got down to examining the registry entries and found a fix:

1. Run regedit
2. Delete the .jps key from HKCR
3. Delete the .jps key from HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\FileExts
4. Logout/Login
5. Reinstall 3DImageThumbnails_x64_Setup

Awesome! Do you know which other application was trying to "take over"?

Btw, I'll add this fix to the next release. Thanks Peterj!

Post by **peterj** » Wed Oct 10, 2012 8:43 am

hi ceashure, i'm not sure if a specific app was trying to take over, or if it was a combination effect with too many apps toying with the registry: before I discovered your app/dll I had installed and uninstalled other apps with JPS support like PhotoDB, Phereo, PhotoShop CS6, etc, I had also tried a utility called Default Program Editor to edit the icon path for JPS files... in the end your dll does exactly what I need in Explorer and with the thumbnails working I then set StereoPhoto Maker as my default app for editing JPS and everything's perfect. I don't use MPO files but I assume the same process would work for them as well...

Thanks for writing such a useful app!!

Post by **animationdirect** » Sat Oct 13, 2012 10:57 pm

I have Win7 64bit. I tried the "delete .mpo in the registry/uninstall/restart win/re-install" trick but mpo thumbs still don't show up.
However, if I rename the .mpo files to jps extensions, the thumbs show up instantly.
But when I try to rename the extension back Windows crashes with an error.
"COM Surrogate stopped working"
It then asks if you want to check for a solution online or just close the program.

Please tell me there is a fix for this.
My camera shoots mpos and I don't want to have to rename all the files extensions.
Also to put back on my camera to show others, I'd have to rename them to mpo and then Windows would crash every photo renamed.

PS. Also tried running install as administrator.

Error details:
Problem Event Name: APPCRASH
Application Name: DllHost.exe
Application Version: 6.1.7600.16385
Application Timestamp: 4a5bca54
Fault Module Name: gdiplus.dll
Fault Module Version: 6.1.7601.17825
Fault Module Timestamp: 4f9242bf
Exception Code: c0000005
Exception Offset: 0000000000089df6
OS Version: 6.1.7601.2.1.0.256.48
Locale ID: 1033
Additional Information 1: cd59
Additional Information 2: cd59b5599b6ee743fbea8af032ae2e88
Additional Information 3: 688f
Additional Information 4: 688f53c0eb19bd1f274e4bf56d5c3739

Post by **ceashure** » Sun Oct 14, 2012 9:36 am

I'll see what I can do, but I've got to tell you. I've just had a hard drive crash and lost the source code to everything. However I was able to recover a majority of my files (thanks to linux). The bad news is, the recovered files have no file names, no folder structure, and is mixed in with 300GB of other files (all my family photos too :/)....give me a little bit of time to try and recover and piece together the source (or recreate from scratch if I have to), and I'll see what I can do.

If it's very important to you to get taken care of right -away, you could try re-installing windows, then install this immediately after doing so. It should work with no problems. The issue seems to come into play when other application have tried to overtake control over the specific files formats. If you do happen to start installing some 3d applications and notice a particular one that makes it stop working. I could then have a solid way to reproduce this and provide a fix (assuming I can my source pieced back together).

Post by **ase69s** » Sun Oct 14, 2012 10:05 am

Thanks for the tip, tried deleting those keys, rebooting, installing your program's x64 version, rebooting again...no thumbnails when exploring folders .jps files

The icons/thumbnails where the ones of unknow file type :S, then did right click, open with Irfanview and the icons were of the irfanview file type, so no results...is there another way to solve this?

PD: Sorry about your HD crash...for the next time remember that backups and online repositories for your source code are your friends

Post by **animationdirect** » Sun Oct 14, 2012 10:32 pm

I had PowerDVD 12 associated with all my 3d stuff. It plays and views 3D files. (the ones I have anyways)
I deleted .mpo from the registry so that PowerDVD wouldn't take it over. (as previously stated)
Something seems to be stuck between PowerDVD, .mpo files, and Windows.
So now I might uninstall PowerDVD and then check/clean registry, then install your program again, then install PowerDVD again.
Hopefully without having PowerDVD on there at all, Windows will let .mpo control go.

It's not that important to get it working but it is very very useful to have thumbnail views of my 3D photographs.
You did great work on creating it.
You've probably helped hundreds if not thousands of people because of it.

Microsoft should include thumbnails views as an update.
Most pics and video files already show up as thumbnails why can't they just add compatibility updates for new formats?
Licensing issues, the sheer number of different formats, or just cheap, laziness?
Or are they waiting to save this feature for a future version of Windows to get people to buy, yet another upgrade.

Post by **animationdirect** » Sun Oct 14, 2012 11:05 pm

None of that worked.
However running the attached registry fixes worked from: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/fuji3d/message/10244

I had to run mpo reset and then the mpo thumbs registry file.
Make sure Windows Explorer isn't running or open.
I also ran CCleaner to clear out any old thumbnail files that might have been left over from the past repair attempts.
Then I rebooted.
It works now.
I now have mpo thumnails.

Post by **ceashure** » Thu Oct 18, 2012 6:00 pm

Just what I needed! However, I can't seem to find a way to download those attached registry files. How did you do it?

Post by **ase69s** » Fri Oct 19, 2012 8:04 am

In the end it worked

but it took some days before the thumbnails started to appear...

Is there some way to force it the next time we install it in a fresh computer?

Thanks a lot by the way!

Post by **cybereality** » Fri Oct 19, 2012 5:35 pm

You may need to clear the thumbnail cache in Windows.

Post by **ceashure** » Sat Dec 01, 2012 6:55 pm

I unfortunately never found the original source code, but I did end up rewriting it again.

From messing around it seems that:
A) Windows likes to keep a thumbnail of files even if they are invalid thumbnails.
B) Will update the thumbnail when the file is created or changed.

I've looked high and low, and there no automatic way to tell windows to invalidate a previous thumbnail cache for specific file types. Even so, the thumbnail caches are per directory, instead of system wide.

I think copying all the files from one directory to another would be enough to tell windows to update the thumbnails of those files.

Post by **shdwlynx** » Tue Aug 27, 2013 9:04 am

ceashure, thanks for the thumbnail creator! I hope you're still around on this board. It would be great if it just showed one eye's worth of image (so it looked like a normal thumbnail rather than two side by side images.) However, that's not why I'm posting, although it'd be nice.

I'm running Win7 64 bit and whenever I enable any kind of MPO thumbnail generator (yours or just forcing Windows to treat MPOs as JPGs) my dllhost.exe process (COM Surrogate) goes full bore on one processor core and continues to eat memory until it's allocated almost all 8 GB of my physical RAM to itself.

It does eventually create thumbs, which sometimes appear when I kill the process harshly. I suspect it's just going through all of my folders and creating thumbs for all of my thousands of MPOs, but I'd like to be sure. Any ideas on what it's doing? I always thought it only did thumbs for the current folder you're looking at...

Post by **ceashure** » Tue Aug 27, 2013 10:01 am

I'll see about adding the single pic thumbnails. I'd still like some way to display that it's a 3d image if I switch to the single image thumbnails.

I'll double check the code for any memory leaks and let you know. I haven't had any issues, but I also don't have a ton of images. The thumbnail process should be per directory...and only the files visible in explorer at the time.

Post by **peterj** » Fri Aug 30, 2013 9:26 pm

@ceashure - I'd like to "+1" shdwlynx's request for single image view. In my case I have StereoPhoto Maker set as the default app for 3D images and it somehow adds a small icon saying "3D" at the lower right of the thumbnails that your great code creates. I assume that if your code renders a single left/right image as the thumbnail then the StereoPhoto Maker logo won't go away. In conclusion for me I wouldn't need your thumbnail code to show anything other than a single image, since my other app will make it clear that it's 3D.

@shdwlynx - I was having a terrible problem for weeks where the 3D thumbnails were super slow to generate, with dllhost.exe going ballistic and consuming all memory and CPU in the meantime. Killing dllhost.exe would cause the 3D thumbnails to display *immediately*. Eventually I worked out that whatever code is responsible for building the thumbnails for .mp4 movies was causing the abnormal memory/CPU usage and that the delayed 3D thumbnails were just a side effect of that. Using ShellExView I disabled MF MPEG Property Handler and MF MPEG-4 Property Handler and my problem was solved: 3D thumbnails display immediately and my memory/CPU back to normal. (

...but what about .mp4 thumbnails? Many of my mp4's already seem to have a thumbnail and that remains. New .mp4's are a problem but 3D thumbnails are my top priority since I have hundreds of images. ...@ceashure if you have time up your sleeve maybe you want to write a better .mp4 thumbnail generator for Windows too!

Post by **ceashure** » Sat Aug 31, 2013 6:04 am

During my testing, I have found that to be the case too. For me, generating thumbnails for movie types consumed 100% of my RAM (this is with 3D image thumbnails generator not even installed on a fresh windows install). I've also ensured that the code I wrote was properly releasing all memory.

I'll work on creating this single image version.

Post by **ceashure** » Sat Aug 31, 2013 2:51 pm

I have updated the app with Single thumbnails. See the first post for where to download.

Please uninstall the old version prior to installing 1.2. It's using a new installer and will not detect/auto-uninstall v1.1

I'm marking it as Beta since a lot of the code has changed. Please let me know how it works out.

Post by **peterj** » Sat Aug 31, 2013 5:21 pm

wow, that was fast turnaround!

tried it and found a couple of things:

1. Installer - after the first installation nothing seemed to happen, so I went into Control Panel Uninstall a Program to remove it and found it wasn't listed. So I ran the installer again and it strangely popped up the message "Already installed, do you want to remove?" So I removed, reinstalled and it works now.

2. Thumbnails - left image generated perfectly for new .jps files. No change in thumbnail for all the existing .jps files I already have, even after running Disk Cleanup to clear old thumbnails. Is there a better way than Disk Cleanup to force thumbnail regeneration?

Post by **ceashure** » Sat Aug 31, 2013 5:55 pm

1) I'll look into that...odd
2) Windows doesn't regenerate thumbnails after they've been made, except if the modified date changes. If you don't mind setting all your modified dates to "now", then download the attached zip, move the batch file into the directory that contains your files and execute it.

Post by **peterj** » Thu Oct 10, 2013 8:53 pm

Hiya, I tried reverting from left-image thumbnail to side-by-side and ran into some more problems:

3. After reinstalling 1.2Beta with the side-by-side option the thumbnails now show four images side-by-side. I can't be sure because it's such a low-height extra-wide thumbnail but I suspect the thumbnail is LRLR, as if the driver is taking the entire image (which is LR to begin with) and putting it side-by-side with itself.

4. Tried removing 1.2Beta to reinstall the original (side-by-side only) 64 bit driver but the download link at the top of this page is broken for the 64 bit version.

5. Reinstalled 1.2Beta with the left-image-only option and now some thumbnails show side-by-side while others show left-image only, even after the hack to rebuild thumbnails.

Seems to be a problem with the driver sometimes confusing the original LR image as being a single L or R image only.

Post by **ceashure** » Fri Oct 11, 2013 5:31 am

I've noticed in some of the test images I have, MPS seems to contain more than two images. Usually full sized LR, then a thumbnail LR. I put some checks in to help mitigate that from happening, but I may nothave considered all possibilities. If it's not too much to ask, can I have you send me the erroneous images in a PM? If I have the problematic images, I can fix it very quickly.

Post by **peterj** » Sun Nov 03, 2013 7:17 pm

hi ceashure, I created two test images for you and tried sending a few times in october, but every time my PMs get stuck in the Outbox and never get sent. can you try PMing me with an alternative email address?

Post by **cybereality** » Sun Nov 03, 2013 7:47 pm

If a message is in the outbox it means the person has not checked their PMs and has not read the message.

As soon as they read the message, it will be marked as "sent".

Post by **ceashure** » Sun Nov 03, 2013 8:14 pm

I didn't realize I had any PMs. It seems I only get email alerts for thread replies, but not PMs. I've responded to you, peterj.

Post by **dpa99c_000** » Sun Jan 03, 2016 8:17 am

@ceashure The site http://s3d.me/ seems to no longer exist - do you still have a local copy of these setup files you could share via this forum?

Post by **ceashure** » Sun Jan 03, 2016 4:00 pm

I've fixed the site. You should be able to download. Thanks for letting me know!

Post by **peterj** » Sun Jan 03, 2016 10:07 pm

hi ceashure, I get the following error when trying to access the website:

Server Error

403 - Forbidden: Access is denied.
You do not have permission to view this directory or page using the credentials that you supplied.