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I want to see a thumbnail preview in place of the file explorer icon. I've managed to get this working for PSD's and PDFs, but not AI files. I know there's no native support for this, and I'm fairly sure I've had this working in the past. I've been unable to recreate it on my most recent re-install.

I've see a lot of suggestions for using SageThumbs with GhostScript, but it doesn't seem to be working on my machine, I even reverted to the recommended version of ghostscript in case there was some dependency on the previous version. Everything else works, but ai thumbnails are just the adobe illustrator 2020 file icon.

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3 Answers 3

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Microsoft PowerToys provides a PDF thumbnail handler. With a bit of tweaking in the Registry, you can associate .ai files with it as well, while keeping Illustrator as the default application.

First, install PowerToys. Open the PowerToys settings and go to the "File Explorer add-ons" tab. Scroll down to the "Icon Preview" section and ensure that "Enable PDF (.pdf) thumbnails" is enabled.

Once the PDF handler has been installed, follow these steps to associate it with .ai files:

  1. Open Registry Editor and navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\.ai\ShellEx.
  2. Create a new key named {E357FCCD-A995-4576-B01F-234630154E96}. This is the CLSID where Windows looks for a thumbnail handler.
  3. Set the (Default) value to {BCC13D15-9720-4CC4-8371-EA74A274741E}. This is the CLSID for the PowerToys PDF handler.

Alternatively, save the following to a .reg file and merge it into your registry:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\.ai\ShellEx\{E357FCCD-A995-4576-B01F-234630154E96}]
@="{BCC13D15-9720-4CC4-8371-EA74A274741E}"

Once this is done, reboot your PC and File Explorer should start to generate thumbnails for your Illustrator files.

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    No need to reboot. Just kill all Windows Explorer processes and run it again. Here is the cmd command. taskkill /im explorer.exe /f & explorer
    – rint
    Commented May 14, 2022 at 6:01
  • Does this still work for anyone? The correct CLSID for your system can be found by searching the for PdfPreviewHandler however I had no luck.
    – secondplace
    Commented Nov 18, 2023 at 9:10
  • I checked under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\.pdf\ShellEx and copied the key and value from there, worked perfectly. The key in step 2 was the same but the value in step 3 was different; I assume if the pdf previews are working then whatever is in there will be valid for .ai files too.
    – evankh
    Commented Feb 10 at 6:11
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Not a great solution, but you can associate acrobat with AI files and it will create thumbnails. I did this for a couple of years. Downside is, to edit AI file you have to right click and choose "open with", which is a pain. Additionally, if you have AI smart object in PS, double-clicking it will open Acrobat! So far in 2020, I have not been willing to go that route again yet...

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Take a look at this solution to the problem for previewing Illustrator files: https://github.com/kov-serg/ai-extension

I launched install.cmd on behalf of the administrator and .ai thumbnail previews in explorer were immediately displayed! This is great, as I have tried many different programs and changes in the windows registry before, but there was no effect. I'm working on Windows 11. It is possible that this applies to other versions of Windows.

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