# Advanced Thumbnail Previews

Other thumbnail preview options are in the "View" menu under "Previews". This menu allows you to configure the following items:

### Use Pixie's thumbnail format:

This option tells PixiePlus to use it's own thumbnail format and is selected by default. Unselecting it will cause PixiePlus to generate Konqueror compatible thumbnails instead. This is not recommended since Konqueror thumbnails cannot be shared among different users and you cannot do things like put them on a floppy along with your images because they are stored in a different location. Only unselect this if you frequently view images in Konqueror and not PixiePlus.

PixiePlus can of course read any Konqueror thumbnails no matter what this setting is so you'll never have to regenerate a thumbnail already created in Konqueror. This only affects creating new thumbnails.

### Low Quality Previews:

The next option is if to use low quality previews. This creates dithered thumbnails that require only around 1/3rd the space as normal thumbnails when using highcolor images. Dithering does not look nice with some images so this is off by default. This option is only recommended if you are tight on disk space and have a lot of images.

A normal preview A low quality preview

### Check For Embedded TIFF Thumbnails:

This option tells PixiePlus to look for a thumbnail embedded in TIFF files when generating it's own previews. Many TIFF files include a small preview of a picture inside the image file. Using this when generating thumbnails is much faster than scaling down a huge TIFF image. This is on by default.

A normal TIFF preview Using the preview from the camera

### Check For Embedded JPEG Thumbnails:

Like the above option, this tells PixiePlus to look for a thumbnail embedded in JPEG files when generating previews instead of scaling down the fullsized image. Unlike TIFF, this option is not on by default because it can actually slow down thumbnail generation if none of your JPEG files have embedded thumbnails. It wastes time searching for it. Only turn this option on if you have a digital camera that supports embedded thumbnails.

Also, the quality of embedded JPEG thumbnails made by early cameras tend to be very low. If this is the case you can turn this option off and allow PixiePlus to make it's own thumbnail from the fullsized image.

### KDE Thumbnails For Non-image Files:

The rest of the menu is for making previews of non-image files. While PixiePlus uses it's own thumbnail routines for image files it can also use the KDE I/O system for previewing tons of other formats! The options in the menu are based on a full KDE3.1 installation with KOffice and KDE Graphics installed. If you are running KDE3.0 or don't have all the optional packages installed you may not be able to generate previews for all the file types listed.

When generating previews PixiePlus will first handle all the images then tell KDE to do the rest. So you'll actually see the progress and statusbar go through 2 steps: First the images and then the other files. You can of course press the "Stop" button at any time if it is taking too long.

Unlike Konqueror, PixiePlus will always save the resulting preview image if there is enough space. Konqueror by default only saves previews for some formats and sets an upper limit on the number to save. Since PixiePlus requires you to manually select when to generate previews I figure if you want the preview you probably want it saved.

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