SageThumbs 2K

Thumbnails for everything Windows won't show you.

A modern, crash-isolated Rust shell extension for Windows 11: the clean-room revival of the legendary (but decade-abandoned) SageThumbs.

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SageThumbs 2K is a crash-isolated Rust shell extension for Windows 11 that adds File Explorer thumbnails, a right-click image toolkit, and a QuickLook-style preview for 334 file types Windows can't render natively, including camera RAW, Photoshop PSD, HEIC/AVIF, video, ebooks, comics, and the long tail of obscure formats.

TL;DR

• 🖼️ Explorer thumbnails for 334 file types it ignores: camera RAW, Photoshop, HEIC/AVIF, video (MKV, WebM, MP4, MOV…), JPEG-XR, MS Office, DjVu, ebooks & comics, 3D-print files, and the obscure long tail.
• 🛡️ A corrupt or malicious file can't crash Explorer: runs out-of-process, panic-guarded, with a sandboxed decoder.
• ⚡ Fast even on big files: camera RAW thumbnails from its embedded preview instead of a slow demosaic (3–13× quicker), and no format is allowed to hang a folder.
• 🧰 Right-click toolkit: convert, resize, lossless rotate, combine-to-PDF/CBZ, system-wide eyedropper, OCR, and more; all non-destructive, and multi-file jobs run in parallel across every core.
• 👁️ Press Space to preview any file, QuickLook-style: an instant full-size popup with video & audio playback, syntax-highlighted code, rendered Markdown, multi-page PDF paging, a Save button (Ctrl+S) to save the page or frame you're viewing as a PNG, font specimens, archive listings, SQLite databases (tables, columns and rows, read-only), email files (.eml and Outlook .msg: headers, body and the attachment list, with nothing fetched from the web), 3D-print models (STL/OBJ/PLY, shaded), a light/dark button on the window itself (for the dark photo or bright scan that reads better the other way round), arrow-key folder browsing and full-screen (F11). Works in Explorer, on the Desktop, in Everything search results, and inside any app's Open/Save dialog.
• 🔤 Copy text off your screen: drag a region and the words land on your clipboard, in an editable window so you can fix a misread. Uses Windows' own recognizer, so it adds nothing to the download.
• 🎛️ Make the menu yours: drag-reorder (and show/hide) every right-click entry and its dividers; the context menu mirrors your layout exactly.
• 🎨 Redesigned Settings: a Win11-style category nav rail with toggle switches, a search box that finds any setting on any page, system-following dark mode, 36 languages.
• 🦀 100% clean-room Rust, free for personal use (PolyForm Noncommercial); no GFL.

Download the installer → Two clicks and your File Explorer just... works.

Note from the Developer

I'm a huge fan of SageThumbs. There are 4 things I always install on a new build, Chrome, XnShell, Everything and SageThumbs. Having noticed multiple system crashes from SageThumbs recently and no update in almost a decade, I decided it was time to right this injustice...

After about a week, and an embarrassing amount of tokens, we now have a ground-up, rust native, alternative that now supports hundreds of formats, extensive red teaming, obsessively optimized for speed with carefully audited packaging, dozens of iterations through UI/UX for simplicity, menu editors, a color picker, screenshot tool, etc.

Please tell your friends, star the repo and if you find anything broken, please let me know.

The story

The original SageThumbs was a Windows legend. It made Explorer show thumbnails for hundreds of formats nothing else could. Then it stopped: no updates since ~2017, built on the proprietary, frozen GFL library.

SageThumbs 2K rebuilds it from scratch in safe Rust (a maintained decode pipeline, real crash isolation, and a native Windows 11 look) while keeping the one thing that made it great: thumbnails for everything.

✨ Features