Has anyone ever made a thumbnailer for Vue content types, for surveying and previewing all the content you have before you get into Vue itself? Or perhaps a way for Windows Explorer or IrfanView to use and show Vue's own visual content previews?

I'm aware of PZDB (will index perfectly, but no thumbnail previews), and P3DO (a few squinty previews, but not very useful).

I also came across a description of an old webinar in a search snippet, which said it would show viewers how to have Vue itself output tiny thumbnail renders for all its content, in order to work with another big 3D software. But that was many years ago, and the page itself has gone. I imagine that was done via a script, which would run through all the content and make a tiny render of each.

Never heard of such a thing but agree it would be useful.

Ok, I figured it out. VUE Infinite 2016 and VUE xStream 2016 both already offer... "Scenes and assets thumbnail previews in Windows Explorer".

But this feature can only work in the proper Windows Explorer, and not in a third-party Explorer replacement or in PZDB. That was where I was going wrong.

So this is how it's done, for those with the pre-subscription 2016 R4 or R5:

1. Open Windows Explorer and go to your content folders at C:|ProgramData|e-onsoftware|Vue xStream 2016. Set it to something sensible like View: Large Icons.

2. Over on the left panel, select the topmost folder for your content library, right-click it, Properties, Customize.

3. Choose "Optimize this folder for Pictures", and tick "Apply to all subfolders". OK.

4. Some of the newly Picture-friendly folders may then take a few moments to fully render their thumbnails, especially on big scene files. The next time you look into a folder it should be faster to display, as Windows will have cached the thumbnails somewhere.

5. Make a desktop shortcut to the top folder C:|ProgramData|e-onsoftware|Vue xStream 2016 and rename it "Vue Content". Now you can quickly get to a thumbnailed and keyword searchable view of your Vue Content library. Using this you can take screenshots of search results and file-paths, and in that way assemble an ideas/mood-board when planning how to assemble a new scene with your available content.

"Open Folder" for a Vue search-result in PZDB will also give you the thumbnails, because it opens the folder in Windows Explorer.

I assume the above process is much the same for those with a subscription copy of Vue.

Further investigations suggests that a user can extract thumbnails directly from the Windows Explorer cache, using simple freeware. It may be possible to get a cache of thumbnails out that could then be of use in PZDB. Or which would at least sit alongside files of the same name, when using a third-party replacement for Windows Explorer.

Thank you very much for that response; it’s possible that I stumbled on this before but forgot about it....