XnView Software

Take an archive of images, leave the file extension as zip or rar. Take another archive of images, change the extension (I use cbz). Open the folder with the 2 archives in the browser. The zip file will not have a thumbnail/preview pic (at least not if the images are in a folder in the archive, not certain what happens if they're not in a folder), but the archive will open in xnview as though it were a folder. The renamed file on the other hand will have a thumbnail/preview pic, but will not open within xnview. Even if both files are absolutely identical other than the extension. This behavior makes no sense. (It's not an important problem, it just doesn't make sense.)
See this screenshot: http://allspark.net/cypherswipe/folder-with-zip.jpg the thumbnails are the renamed files, which show a thumbnail of the first image in the archive. The zip file was just like the others, but I renamed it back to .zip for test purposes.

Drahken wrote:Take an archive of images, leave the file extension as zip or rar. Take another archive of images, change the extension (I use cbz). Open the folder with the 2 archives in the browser. The zip file will not have a thumbnail/preview pic (at least not if the images are in a folder in the archive, not certain what happens if they're not in a folder), but the archive will open in xnview as though it were a folder. The renamed file on the other hand will have a thumbnail/preview pic, but will not open within xnview. Even if both files are absolutely identical other than the extension. This behavior makes no sense. (It's not an important problem, it just doesn't make sense.)
See this screenshot: http://allspark.net/cypherswipe/folder-with-zip.jpg the thumbnails are the renamed files, which show a thumbnail of the first image in the archive. The zip file was just like the others, but I renamed it back to .zip for test purposes.

XnView use extension to recognize archive format, so it's normal that you have not the same result...

I know that, but how can xnview 'see' the first image in the renamed archive (which is the one it can't open) to make it a thumbnail, but it can't 'see' the first image in the zip file (which is the one it -can- open)??
If it worked full with the zip file (which it recognizes) but didn't work at all with the renamed file (which it doesn't recognize), it would make sense. Being able to do something with a file that it doesn't recognize but not being able to do the same thing on a file it does recognize doesn't make any sense.

Drahken wrote:I know that, but how can xnview 'see' the first image in the renamed archive (which is the one it can't open) to make it a thumbnail, but it can't 'see' the first image in the zip file (which is the one it -can- open)??
If it worked full with the zip file (which it recognizes) but didn't work at all with the renamed file (which it doesn't recognize), it would make sense. Being able to do something with a file that it doesn't recognize but not being able to do the same thing on a file it does recognize doesn't make any sense.

Perhaps you have a shell extension for that (in windows explorer)

Hmm... that could be it. I don't have any shell extensions that I know of that would be causing it, but when I view the actual folder in thumbnail mode it does show the thumbs/previews for the renamed archives (dunno if it's xp itself doing it, or an unknown side-effect of some prog that I have installed) but only an icon for zip/rar files. It would appear that this oddity has nothing to do with xnview. Never occured to me to check & see if it was something explorer related (I always have my folders set to list mode to show more files with less scrolling around).

I guess it's like this:

It checks for the file extension, and if it's a known archive format, it's being treated like one.
If it does not have a known archive extension (and the 'recognize only by extension' is off), then it will search for any kind of image headers. And if it can find any, it'll create a thumbnail.

So, the dumb routine works better here after all.