Thumbnail view

Hi Mike,

While I believe we have some internal code spec'ed out already that should allow us to get thumbnails, we haven't made any public API for that yet.  Can you give some more detail on which control you'd like to see this in?  Such as do you mean in some other "layout mode" of ShellListView (like "Content" layout mode), or in a completely new control like a details pane?  A screenshot showing your ideal result would be helpful.

I thought of a view similar to Windows Explorer's  '(Extra) Large Icons' instead of the list in the demo application. But I believe this is a lot of extra work so I would be fine with an API to get the thumbnail like its shown in Windows Explorer. But then maybe as standalone in shared library?

Yes, this is on the TODO list.  We would like to try and update ShellListView to possibly support multiple views like that.  I've made a note of your request with the related TODO item.

Hi Mike,

For the upcoming build, IShellObject has new thumbnail properties and they will be used in some new ShellListView control layout modes that are being added.

It might be on your TODO list already but is it possible to make the thumbnail retreiving process running in background? It blocks scrolling and opening a folder may take long time. Good job on this however, it's fairly outstanding the competitiors.

Hi Miguel,

Yes, we are currently working on a VirtualizingWrapPanel control that will replace the WrapPanel panel being used right now, and should help with performance.

I've now downloaded the latest version you released yesterday with the virtualized wrap panel. Sadly the UI/app is still blocked when the thumbnails are not retreived instantly. It's still extremely laggy until all thumbnails for the current items are loaded. In Windows Explorer the thumbnails take the same amount of time to load but the UI is not blocked so I assume Microsoft runs the thumbnail generation in a different thread.

Hi Miguel,

Yes we still have on the TODO list to look into separate threads for loading.  Right now we're dispatching them with background priority, but it's still the same UI thread.  

The new virtualizing panel does help things load quicker though in terms of large folders and at least get some UI painting.  This is because with these updates, it's only retrieving the images for visible shell objects instead of all of them.