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 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 (in Windows Vista/7: 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.)