Previewing Non-Standard Images in Picture Library

Question

I am trying to create a picture library that will allow users of the site to store picture documents as well as preview them.

If a image that is, what I would call standard (.jpg, .gif etc.), is uploaded, this works great and the image will show up in the library with a thumbnail preview.

When we try to upload a more complicated image file (say a .EPS), it will upload fine, but it will not show a preview. There is a requirement that they would also like to preview files such as .DWG (AutoCAD drawings).

As far as I can tell, there is no simple way of doing this. There seems to be solutions out there where you manually override the thumbnail and preview images in their appropriate folders (_t and _w) but that doesn't seem like it would be all that great of a solution.

Other ideas would be to have the user upload their image, and then a preview image in another list, and have an Image column as a look up and have them select the preview image to associate with their image, but again, that doesn't seem to be that great.

Does anyone know of a way to do this, if it is even possible, or any workarounds that would be considered somewhat appropriated, or if there are any 3rd party solutions.

Thanks!

Answer 1

If you want to automate this, I would suggest to trap ItemAdded event and have a thumbnail file generated for the item (filter based on extension) uploaded and then upload it to _w and _t folders. I assume that you know how to programmatically generate a thumbnail though.

In past, I had a slightly different scenario where I needed to generate (and add to library) 10 different size of images for the image being uploaded so that appropriate size of image can be served to appropriate mobile screen. I took above approach and it worked out quite well.