How to View Adobe Photoshop PSD Thumbnails in Windows XP Win 7 Explorer

By 22nd January 2012Web Design Birmingham

For those who used Photoshop 7, and have since moved up to photoshop CS-2-3 or 4 will probably be missing the abilit to view PSD thumbnails within Windows XP or Winsows Windows 7.  Adobe has removed this feature as it would prefer you use its built in browser. However when you design website for a living you have 1000s of PSD files on your computer. Having to use the primitive Adobe browser just doesn’t cut the mustard.

The Adobe PSD Thumbnail View Solution

The solution is very simple and takes less than a minute to implement. You don’t even need to reboot Windows. The change is immediate.

  • Go to ‘Start/All Programs/Accessories/System Tools/System Restore’ and follow the instructions to create a system restore point. In the unlikely event things go wrong, come back to this menu to undo any changes you’ve a made
  • Download and open the file, photoshop_tpsd thumbnails Viewer Hack
  • Copy psicon.dll to C:Program FilesCommon FilesAdobeShell – if this folder doesn’t exist create it
  • Run Adobe.reg (double click on it )
  • You now can view PSD files in Thumbnails view within Windows Explorer.
  • When in the folder where the .PSD files are, Make sure that you select thumbnails from the views drop-down, or you may still see the icon as before.