: How to show preview thumbnail for Illustrator files in Windows Explorer? How can I make Windows Explorer use preview thumbnails for Illustrator files (*.ai) like Corel files currently do so that

@Margaret771

Quite old question, refreshed by the system due too few good answers.

New suggestions: 1) Try Windows shell extension "Sage Thumbs". To be able to display Ai files, also Ghostscript must be installed.

This is not the finest possible solution, because it


is an old application, the support for Win10 is not promised, I run it in Win7
needs right click to show the thumbnail


There's a better commercial Win shell extension for the same purpose. It's Mystic Thumbs. It also needs Ghostscript, but generates the thumbnails without a need to click.A big folder takes easily a minute to generate the thumbs at the first time. It's free for 2 weeks. After that it must be purchased to use it.

Another idea is to use other seftware to browse your image folders than the Windows Explorer. Adobe Bridge is a bad one because it's so unresponsive. It seems to freeze the machine.

Irfan Wiew's thumbnail wiever is reasonably fast, but it has very different right click options than Win Explorer. Anyway, everything important is available (=copy, move, delete, sort, rename, launch an application)

Irfan Wiew is "pay if you want" -ware.

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@Cugini998

Its possible to do if you have a extension that previews PDF files. Then all you need to do is register the preview for the PDF files to AI files. Now the actual change in registry you have to make may differ depending on your PDF reader but instructions can be found,


on superuser.

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@Berumen635

Illustrator files don't show thumbnail previews. It's too bad, would be useful. You could save out a .jpg or something just to see thumbnail previews but it doesn't sound practical.

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