TGA Thumbnails (and viewer) for Vista and Windows 7 both 32 and 64 bit

2009-12-04

Several years ago I wrote a TGA Thumbnail plugin for Windows 2000 / XP. I skipped having a Vista machine and just recently upgraded to Windows7 64bit. I thought that now that I finally have a 64bit machine to do development on I'd try upgrading the plugin to work there.

I started researching how to do it and found out Microsoft added this subsystem they call the Windows Imaging Component. It basically lets developers make plugins to both read and / or write any image format, plug it into Windows and then any app which uses that system can start loading and/or saving those formats. The cool thing is Vista and Windows7 use it for both thumbnails AND for viewing images.

I did a little searching and someone has already written a TGA codec plugin which you can find here. FastPictureViewer WIC RAW Codec Pack. That's awesome! Saved me the trouble. 😃

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