The OP finds it difficult to be understood and taken serious in this forum. > The OP was asking about an extension thumbnailer for *Windows Explorer*, > not a proprietary application. Proprietary applications provide a "shell extension handler thumbnail extractor" for Windows Explorer so that Windows Explorer (and also the whole Windows Desktop) displays thumbnails for special binary file formats for which a default Windows installation does not already show thumbnails. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/cc144118%28v=vs.85%29.aspx So this question is not about using Windows Explorer instead of for example Nautilus (or Dolphin etc.), but about having thumbnails in the desktop environment for files for which there exists no Linux compatible thumbnailer (because only the software manufacturer knows how to get these thumbnails and they don't provide linux software). On Linux, thumbnailers are usually handled on desktop environment level (gnome-thumbnailer, KDE ThumbCreator), not as an extension of the file manager. Of course we could hack and reverse-engineer a custom thumbnailer for every binary file format for every desktop environment. But if the Windows application already gives us a shell extension handler thumbnail extractor that knows how to extract the thumbnail from these file formats, couldn't we better make use of that? Could we automatically use all shell extension handler thumbnail extractors and use the extracted thumbnails for a gnome-thumbnailer or KDE ThumbCreator?
