Implementing the IExtractImage COM interface

Question

I see a lot of references to IExtractImage when researching how to generate thumbnails in explorer, and I cannot use the new API which is Vista/7 only as the target OS is XP.

Almost all the results I've found talk about using IExtractimage to acquire thumbnails, not implementing IExtractImage to create them. I don't want to retrieve thumbnails, I want to make them so that i can display a custom image format in windows explorer.

Those that do talk about what I want to do, give no examples, dont tell me how I would implement the IExtractImage object and tell me nothing about the APIs to use to actually draw to the thumbnail, and normally reference msdn articles which give 404 not found results.

I'm using c/c++

Answer 1

You want to implement IExtractImage (or IExtractImage2) and register it as a shell extension. A good article on this on CodeProject: http://www.codeproject.com/KB/shell/thumbextract.aspx