How To Open Nef Files In Windows Xp

Restoring Nikon NEF Thumbnails Under Windows XP Service Pack 2

Windows XP has a lot of nice features for digital photographers. Many are geared more towards amateurs than serious shooters, but information technology does support true colour direction, and the thumbnail image previews in Explorer'due south folder views are quite handy. As a Nikon user, I've grown accustomed to having Windows thumbnails of NEF RAW files courtesy of having installed Nikon View and Nikon Capture.

Installing Windows XP Service Pack 2 changed all that though — gone were the thumbnails for NEF files. Previewing other image files remains every bit it was, merely it was the NEF thumbnails that mattered nigh to me. Searching online confirmed that I was not lonely in feeling this loss after installing Microsoft's latest upgrade. People had contacted both Microsoft and Adobe and both are plainly "working on information technology," just no solutions were forthcoming.

Having experience programming, I decided to exercise a flake of rummaging in the Windows registry to see what I could find. Anyone familiar with this spaghetti maze of configuration settings can relate to what I was up against, only brusk of uninstalling Service Pack 2 I figured I didn't have anything to lose. Information technology's probably my duty at this point to remind you lot that you should never direct edit the Windows registry, or if you do, to be sure you back things up before hand. You have been warned. Anyhow, long story short, I couldn't figure it out. If I merely renamed a NEF file to have an extension of .tif instead of .nef, the thumbnails magically appeared, but something was keeping them hidden when the file had the right proper name.

I was able to observe a rather interesting registry hack that permitted you lot to get NEF thumbnails without even needing Nikon View or Capture, so long as yous also did not take Service Pack 2 installed. If you only create a key called ".nef" and add an entry called "PerceivedType" with a value of "image," Windows would happily display thumbnails for NEF files. Not that this probably does any practiced since it doesn't work with Service Pack 2.

In terms of helpful solutions, I have found ii.

The first answer I came upwardly with was NEFView from Softwhile. This $x shareware program does a squeamish job of giving you back the missing thumbnails in the Thumbnail view also every bit the larger preview in the Details section of the List view of Windows Explorer. Bones EXIF data such as shutter speed, f/terminate and ISO are displayed by popup tooltips when you lot hover your mouse over a NEF file. All in all, a adept solution to the problem and one that avoids mucking about in the registry trying to fix things yourself. Having spent more than than the $x purchase toll in fourth dimension and frustration trying to find a way to fix things, NEFView was a welcome observe.

Then I found a program called dpMagic (Digital Picture show Magic) from UCE Systems. It comes in two versions, the then chosen Community Edition and dpMagic Plus. The Customs Edition is completely free and provides the same functionality as NEFView with the exception of tooltip EXIF information. In improver to supporting Nikon NEF files though, it besides gives you thumbnail support for nearly other types of digital photographic camera RAW files including Fuji RAF, Canon CRW and CR2, Kodak KDC and DCR, Minolta MRW, Olympus ORF, Pentax PEF and Sigma X3F files. Mind you, I don't take files of most of these types so I oasis't extensively tested them, but I can confirm it does a good job of supporting NEF. For $9.95 you can upgrade to dpMagic Plus to become shutter speed, f/stop, focal length and other basic EXIF data in popup tooltips, a control console applet to configure various settings, a slide show manner and various other goodies. If you correct-click on a NEF file and select Backdrop, it gives you a new "Digital Picture Data" tab with more extensive EXIF data and a color histogram display. The thumbnails themselves read the embedded jpeg put their by Nikon so they display just fine, but I should warn you that the slide show and histogram brandish read the actual raw data and seem to be based on the "every bit shot" data without applying any of the changes to white remainder or other settings you may have made in Nikon Capture or Adobe Camera Raw.

While information technology would be nice if Microsoft (or Adobe) would ready this, it is nice to detect that there are answers available out there. I would have no hesitation in recommending either dpMagic or NEFView. You can download trial versions of both (all three if you count the 2 editions of dpMagic) and so you tin can see what you lot remember. All of them work fine under Service Pack 2. That'southward the important role. The residue is only icing on the cake.

To avoid disruptive anyone who is not familiar with the display of thumbnails in general in Windows XP, the operating arrangement tin can natively do it for jpegs, gif other common prototype formats, but not NEF or other raw camera formats. The options discussed in this article allow Windows to have this added power. NEFView and dpMagic are not stand up-alone applications such equally Nikon View, ACD Come across or the Photoshop file browser that office equally epitome organizers and viewers. The goal is to display NEF files in regular Windows folders in place of the standard file icons, not merely to brandish them in split program you accept to run to await at your files. While seeing your images in binder directory listings won't make you lot a ameliorate photographer or even take the identify of such paradigm browsers, they sure practise brand things user-friendly for general use.

One more thing worth mentioning while I'm on the discipline is that yous can change the size of your thumbnails past creating or editing another registry value. Once again, edit the registry at your ain risk, but this is an like shooting fish in a barrel change. But add a "ThumbnailSize" value and you're done:

The value hither is in hexadecimal so this is actually 150 pixels (decimal). Regedit.exe lets you enter values in decimal and then you don't have to become out a calculator. Legal values are betwixt 32 and 256 decimal. This change will affect only the electric current user. The same setting under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE will affect all users of the reckoner. Microsoft'south own Tweak UI utility will permit you to easily alter the per user thumbnail size setting.

Microsoft does publish an "Application Compatibility Testing and Mitigation Guide for Windows XP Service Pack 2" merely it neglects to mention the Nikon NEF problem. I promise this tip will prove useful if you've been stumped past this one equally I had been.

By the style, I've had no other problems with Service Pack 2 and have now installed it on iii machines.

Update 09/08/2004 -Shaun Ivory, a Microsoft Software Design Engineer posted a fix today on another site. While it doesn't look quite as unproblematic equally the "PerceivedType" ready that used to work earlier Service Pack 2, it is nevertheless a adequately straightforward registry hack. Apparently, as of Service Pack 2, the thumbnail extractor would only work with images having known file extensions (JPG, TIF, BMP, etc). This set up explicitly tells Windows Explorer in a mode that it understands that it is supposed to use the thumbnail extractor for NEF files.

Update 12/vii/2004 - Nikon has at present issued an updated to address this problem themselves. Third-party fixes such equally dpMagic add together support in a higher place and beyond the basic trouble, but for those that want it, you can download the Nikon fix here.

Update 5/26/2005 - The aforementioned fix that Shaun Ivory from Microsoft published for NEF thumbnails also works to create thumbnails for Adobe'south new DNG format:

Registry hack to add DNG thumbnails

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.dng\ShellEx\{BB2E617C-0920-11d1-9A0B-00C04FC2D6C1}] @="{3F30C968-480A-4C6C-862D-EFC0897BB84B}"

Update 06/26/2005 - Microsoft now too has a solution. The Microsoft RAW Paradigm Thumbnailer and Viewer for Windows XP provides support for Nikon and Canon raw files.

Appointment posted: September v, 2004 (updated June 26, 2005)

Source: http://www.earthboundlight.com/phototips/nef-windows-xp-sp2.html

Posted by: daughertywrintrah.blogspot.com

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