PDF thumbnails in Windows Explorer

What you see

• The thumbnail is page 1 of the document, rendered by Windows' own PDF engine; SageThumbs adds no PDF library of its own.
• Press Space for Quick preview and page through the whole document with the arrow keys or Page Up and Page Down, with a page counter in the title bar.
• In Quick preview, Copy text (OCR) reads the page you are on, Ctrl+S saves that page as a PNG, and Ctrl+P prints it.

Limits

• Thumbnails show page 1 only. Use Quick preview to see the other pages.
• The small preview inside the right-click menu skips PDFs and shows the file name and size instead, so a slow file can never freeze the menu. Its thumbnail in Explorer is unaffected.
• In OneDrive and other synced folders, files stored on the PC get thumbnails as anywhere else. Online-only files are left to the cloud app, since nothing is downloaded just to draw a thumbnail.

More you can do

• Right-click a set of images and choose Combine into PDF, or Combine into searchable PDF to add an invisible text layer from Windows' own OCR.

Extensions this covers

See every format SageThumbs 2K supports or browse all format guides.

Thumbnails not showing?

• Windows caches thumbnails, and a file it failed on once stays failed. In SageThumbs, Settings ▸ Advanced ▸ Rebuild thumbnail cache clears the cache and restarts Explorer.
• Make sure File Explorer's "Always show icons, never thumbnails" option is off, and that the format is ticked in SageThumbs Settings ▸ File types.
• Run st2k doctor in a terminal. It only reads, checks the whole chain, and prints a fix under anything that is wrong.

Related guides

• DjVuScanned books and documents, shown by their first page.
• Illustrator .aiIllustrator artwork, without Illustrator installed.
• EPUBEbook covers, read straight out of the book.