Viewing PSD (Photoshop) files in Windows Explorer (Vista)

Here’s how to restore thumbnails for PSD in explorer

The psd thumbnail view is not included by design in the lastest version of photoshop. To restore this feature follow these steps:

1. Download psicon.dll
2. Place the DLL in C:\Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\Shell\
3. Thumbnail previews of PSD files are now back

The psicon.dll can be downloaded from Here

XP version

While Windows Explorer is far from a good "thumbnail viewer" is still pretty handy when you dont have photoshop or a 3rd party image browser running and u really need to quickly see a thumbnail of your PSD file.

I remember that a while ago, I used to have all the thumbnails on, but now all i see is the psp logo. A 10 minute digging on google revealed the problem.
It seems Adobe did not include this feature anymore starting with Photoshop CS. Some say they did it in order to promote the internal image browser and later Bridge. Some say that the thing was buggy (it did crash the explorer on me sometimes) but the problem was somewhere in between Microsoft and Adobe who blamed each other. Furthermore, it seems that users upgrading from PSP 7 to CS could still see the thumnails.

Anyways, if you have Photoshop CS (not CS2) and you're on windows and you did not upgraded from an older PSP version, this thing is for you.
All you need is a dll file and some registry settings.

The dll file is called PSICON.DLL. This was previously included with Photoshop but now not anymore. The file should normally be placed in
C:\Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\Shell.
The registry settings are a bit too much to write here.
But you could easily download the attached ZIP file which contains everything you need, including instructions.

But before you try this make sure you:
= have a normal Win XP installed on the C:\ partition (not D or other drive)
= have Photoshop CS1 installed
= do not already have the PSD thumbnails working in windows explorer

After installing, you could restart the computer or log-off, log-on.

This thing worked for me, but toying with the registry could seriously stop your windows from booting up.


Zip File