Shortly after my last post, in which I showed how to activate Photoshop thumbnails in Windows Explorer, I was made aware of the PSD Codec by Ardfry Imaging, which promises similar and better results. For $ 19.95, it will display Photoshop preview images not only in the Explorer, but also in the Windows Photo Gallery, Windows Live Photo Gallery and Windows 7’s Media Center. Also, this codec is able to read XMP, IPTC, and EXIF metadata from .psd files, so you can even use them as search criteria in the Windows Desktop Search.

I decided to test this little tool. First I must say that I’m still working with Windows XP on my computer. Should read: Neither do I have a Windows Photo Gallery, nor a Media Center, nor a Desktop Search. Same for the Windows Live Photo Gallery, which – like everything else that begins with “Windows Live” – I have never used. Not the best conditions to test this program, huh?

Before

Those who regularly work with Photoshop are perhaps also annoyed of Windows Explorer’s inability to support .psd files in thumbnail view: While bitmaps, JPEGs and other common image formats all appear as a small thumbnail, you only get to see the blue Photoshop icon for PSDs. Now, if you own an image management program anyway (such as the free XnView), you can somewhat circumvent this problem, because those are usually able to display PSDs; however, sometimes you just want to quickly search for a certain Photoshop file and don’t really want to start such a program just for that.

After

After I had been annoyed by this for quite some time, I recently decided to google for a solution, and lo and behold: There is one – since 2005, in fact! You just have to download this .zip file and unzip the included file psicon.dll to the folder C:\Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\Shell. If this folder doesn’t exist, just create it. Then double-click Adobe.reg, and you can finally admire your .psd files as thumbnails in your Explorer.

(This great little DLL is originally from here, but the download link is dead. Fortunately, I found a copy on this site.)

Phew, haven’t posted anything in over two months! It’s not that I didn’t have enough to write, but at the moment I just don’t have the time and rest for it. And if I do have some time, then the brilliant weather makes me prefer staying outside on the terrace with a glass of wine, waiting for the fireflies instead of writing a blog post. (I could of course be so nerdy and write my post outside on a laptop … But no, thanks.)

Recently I got myself an external hard drive enclosure, so I could browse through my old discarded hard disks from time to time. Then I had the idea to use one of those disks as a USB flash drive and connect it, for example, to a DVD player, a car radio or a digital picture frame. So I just tried and attached the disk to my DVD player – but unfortunately, it didn’t work. I quickly found out that this was due to the NTFS formatting: USB flash drives work with FAT32 for compatibility reasons.
No problem – just reformat it! Well, at least that was what I thought, but then I found that you can only FAT32-format partitions with a maximum size of 32 gigabytes. My old disk had 80 GB, however, and I wanted to have it all in one single partition.

Actually, I just wanted to write a short post about my newly discovered WordPress Plugin: Broken Link Checker. It allows you to scan through and test all links on your site. It will then list all links that don’t work anymore or are now being redirected to a different address. Since the Internet is a really lively medium, not every link will remain forever, so this is a highly recommendable plugin for anyone who hates dead links as much as I do.