.bmp File Icons

[Kent A. Signorini]

Hello. I've read that there is a way to turn on an option in Windows 95 so
that the icon for .bmp files is actually a thumbnail of the .bmp and not the
icon of the drawing program associated to .bmp.

Does anyone know how to do this?

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Kent A. Signorini | ke...@datanet.ab.ca
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"If you don't net-surf, what exactly DO you do?"

[David Flynn]

Hi Kent...

> Hello. I've read that there is a way to turn on an option in Windows 95 so
> that the icon for .bmp files is actually a thumbnail of the .bmp and not the
> icon of the drawing program associated to .bmp.
>
> Does anyone know how to do this?

This involves a bit of fiddling inside the Windows 95 Registry -- not something to be done blindly. You'll need to run the RegEdit
program (not loaded on any Start menu folder, but it can be found as REGEDIT.EXE in your WINDOWS directory). I'd strongly
recommend you read some good books or magazine articles to get familiar with the do's and don't of Reg editing before you start
a'hacking. These should fill you in on the caveats of backing up the Registry and how to restore it if things go wrong.

That said, here's the good oil.

Run regEdit and use the Find feature to locate the entry Paint.Picture in the left side of the display (also known as the Key pane).
The full path is HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Paint.Picture.

Open the paint.Picture folder and then open the DefaultIcon folder in the Key pane.

Double-click (Default) in the right-hand (Value) pane. Replace the "Value Data" entry with %1 -- that's all, just an
unimpressive-looking %1.

Now reboot your PC and open your Windows directory -- the wallpaper BMP files will appear as thumbnails of their actual image
instead of the Paint document icon.

The %1 tells Windows that default icon for this file type is in the file itself, and as theres no icon in a BMP file Windows 95 creates
an icon based on the bitmap.

Another neat trick is that if you change the extension of a bitmap to ICO Windows will automatically rescale the picture into 32x32
icon size, reduce the colour depth and display the bitmap image as the file icon (although this of course severs the connection
between the former BMP and the Windows 95 Paint program).

Have fun.

David

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David Flynn
The WordSmith Group: Technical writing with a touch of style
word...@msn.com