Viewer for PSD files

Currently I have a network box setup as RAID1 (mirror) and am wanting to change it to separate drives. I'd like to clean it up before I copy it all to another drive. Bridge (CS6 & Win7Pro) is painfully slow when trying to view the thumbnails. I've seen FastStone viewer and iFranview mentioned on here quite a lot. I downloaded both and while both were faster there were a lot of thumbnails for PSD files that wouldn't show on any drive. Strange really, some that I've created in the last week would show while some in the same folder wouldn't (even on C-drive). Any suggestions as to the problem or possibly another program to use?

Try THIS ONE Dennis. It doesn't seem to like CR2s but has no problem with PSDs.

ETA: My bad, it's fine with CR2s.

Tried it and got the same result as the others. Not sure why it shows some and not others. I'll have to do some more checking later. Here's a screen grab showing the results.

Thanks for the link.

This "mystery" confuses many people, because it's complicated AND involves a little bug in Photoshop.

The PSD format has an option for "maximizing compatibility." It's found in Photoshop under Edit/Preferences/File Handling. It may be set to "Never", "Always", or "Ask". If a PSD file is saved with "compatibility", an extra jpeg copy of the image is placed at the top of the file. That is so other non-Adobe programs, like FastStone and iFranview can read the file, display the image and a thumbnail.

If the PSD file has layers, no other non-Adobe program can make sense of those layers and create a composite (flattened) version. So "compatibility" sticks a flattened jpeg version in there so they can work. However, that extra jpeg copy makes the PSD file larger, so many people turn compatibility off.

Now the Photoshop "bug" comes in. If a PSD file is truly flat (no layers), Photoshop always sticks the jpeg copy in the file even if you told it not to by setting compatibility to "never". To see the proof of this, save two copies of a image in PSD format. One "flat" version, and one with a simple blank layer added, both with compatibility set to never. The one with the extra blank layer should be slightly larger, but it's not. It will be smaller, because the compatible jpeg is NOT there.

So, you have a mix of PSD files. Some are flat, some have layers. FastStone can display the flat ones because they contain a jpeg copy (regardless of your compatibility setting). But FastStone can't display the layered PSD files unless they were saved with compatibility.

Given your problem, I'd say your layered PSD files were saved with no compatibility. Nothing you can do about that now, exepct to re-write all those PSD images with compatibility turned on.

Even a flat PSD file would be unreadable by other programs. Adobe uses a proprietary lossless compression to store the image data inside a PSD file. No body else can decode that. Thus the reason for the exta jpeg copy.

Works here fine. I also like it because I found nothing that worked with Windows Explorer to show Thumbnails for my new Lumix camera. But this works fine.

Redcrown wrote in post #17768160
This "mystery" confuses many people, because it's complicated AND involves a little bug in Photoshop.

The PSD format has an option for "maximizing compatibility." It's found in Photoshop under Edit/Preferences/File Handling. It may be set to "Never", "Always", or "Ask". If a PSD file is saved with "compatibility", an extra jpeg copy of the image is placed at the top of the file. That is so other non-Adobe programs, like FastStone and iFranview can read the file, display the image and a thumbnail.

If the PSD file has layers, no other non-Adobe program can make sense of those layers and create a composite (flattened) version. So "compatibility" sticks a flattened jpeg version in there so they can work. However, that extra jpeg copy makes the PSD file larger, so many people turn compatibility off.

Now the Photoshop "bug" comes in. If a PSD file is truly flat (no layers), Photoshop always sticks the jpeg copy in the file even if you told it not to by setting compatibility to "never". To see the proof of this, save two copies of a image in PSD format. One "flat" version, and one with a simple blank layer added, both with compatibility set to never. The one with the extra blank layer should be slightly larger, but it's not. It will be smaller, because the compatible jpeg is NOT there.

So, you have a mix of PSD files. Some are flat, some have layers. FastStone can display the flat ones because they contain a jpeg copy (regardless of your compatibility setting). But FastStone can't display the layered PSD files unless they were saved with compatibility.

Given your problem, I'd say your layered PSD files were saved with no compatibility. Nothing you can do about that now, exepct to re-write all those PSD images with compatibility turned on.

Even a flat PSD file would be unreadable by other programs. Adobe uses a proprietary lossless compression to store the image data inside a PSD file. No body else can decode that. Thus the reason for the exta jpeg copy.

Thanks for the info. I never noticed that before. I guess my compatibility is set to always, never checked it before.

Redcrown wrote in post #17768160
So, you have a mix of PSD files. Some are flat, some have layers. FastStone can display the flat ones because they contain a jpeg copy (regardless of your compatibility setting). But FastStone can't display the layered PSD files unless they were saved with compatibility.

Nope, they are all layered files. I never save a flattened PSD file. I do have "Maximize Compatibility" set to "Never".

Here is the layer stack from one that shows and one that doesn't.

My bigger problem is probably why accessing the NAS drives is so slow in some folders.