Thumbnail Explorer Help Information

Help For Thumbnail Explorer
This help file is provided for users of Thumbnail Explorer Desktop Search Software

Introduction
Thumbnail Explorer is the perfect tool for anyone who deals with graphics or CAD and has more then a handful of files. The software allows you to quickly and easily find any file without browsing folders or searching your computer for it. As you type a part of file name Thumbnail Explorer will show a list of thumbnails and will enable you to work with corresponding files without resorting to Windows Explorer.

You can launch Thumbnail Explorer from the Start All Programs menu or from Desktop shortcut that is created for you during installation. We also recommend that you place another shortcut into Windows Quick Launch toolbar. This convenient copy can be done easily by dragging a shortcut from Desktop to Quick Launch toolbar while holding down the CTRL key.

Searching for a file
Thumbnail Explorer maintains an index of files on your computer. This index is created automatically when you start Thumbnail Explorer for the first time. You can search for a file simply by typing part of file name into the search field at the top of the window. Searching is done while you type and as you continue to type the list of files that match your criteria gets shorter.

By using the tabs at the top you can filter your search for only office documents, pictures, or other kinds of files. If you're not sure use the Files tab to see all the files. If the number of found files is more then 100 then only first 100 of files is listed and you may need to type more characters to shorten the list.

You can pattern match a file if you know just a part of its name. Use * or ? to substitute for characters that you don't know. The * will match 0 or more arbitrary characters, while the ? matches a single character.

To search for a particular file type, add file extension. For example 'w?l' will match download.url and wall.dwg while 'w?l*.dwg' will narrow the results to just wall.dwg (an asterisk multi-character wildcard is implicitly added to what you type at the start and end of you search criteria).

Viewing results
There are two modes how you can view search results: Thumbnails and Details. You can switch between them by using View menu at the top of the form.
Thumbnails view shows file name and a thumbnail extracted from the file. If a file does not expose its unique thumbnail then an icon associated with this file extension is shown.
Details view shows columns listing file names, their icons, and containing folders. User can turn on and off additional columns for file size, type, and date/time of file modification by right clicking on the column header. Left click on a column header will sort results by this column.

Windows Integration
Thumbnail Explorer is made so useful because it is fully integrated with Windows. It uses Windows Explorer native mechanism to extract file thumbnails and icons. If a file shows a thumbnail in Windows Explorer then it will show the same thumbnail in Thumbnail Explorer. Furthermore as user installs additional applications on a computer Thumbnail Explorer will gain an ability to show thumbnails and icons of files associated with these applications.

Search results window also supports

• Opening files in their native applications by double clicking

• Dragging files out of Thumbnail Explorer and dropping them into appropriate application

• Showing Windows Explorer context menu on mouse right button click
  At the moment search results window does not support selecting multiple files for right clicking or drag and drop operations.

Managing indexed folders
Initially Thumbnail Explorer will only search certain folders where it expects there to be files. These include your My Documents folder and some additional folders like your Favorites folder. You can tailor the list of indexed folders by clicking Options link at the bottom of the form and adding or removing additional folders on the Indexed Folders tab.

Customizing search tabs
Thumbnail Explorer installs preconfigured to show tabs that we expected to be useful for many users. However our list is not final. You can customize it by pressing the Options link and making changes on Custom Tabs page. You can add or remove tabs and you can modify the list of file extensions for each of the tabs.

Index refresh
Thumbnail Explorer does it's best to keep track of files that you delete or rename and other changes that you make while the application is running but to ensure that your index of files is up to date it's a good idea to refresh the index on a regular basis.
In the Schedule page of Options dialog you can define a schedule that you would like to use to refresh your index. Thumbnail Explorer uses the Windows Task Scheduler to create and run the indexing task. You can view or modify the schedule not only from inside of Thumbnail Explorer but also by going to the Scheduled Tasks folder in the Windows Control Panel.

Thumbnail Explorer also starts index rebuilding whenever you change the list of indexed folders or press Refresh Index link at the bottom of the form.

Additional Help

If you have additional help questions please visit our support forum.