You can see a preview of an image on its file icon. I thought it was
supposed to be the same for other files such as word and text documents. Am
I correct and if so is this feature turned on by default?
Its called the Document Pane. One to click it on you can size it. I
will take over as much of your desktop as you allow, but after a
certain point it won't increase the size of the icon preview.
Here's how:
1. Once you enable it, you should see a different color area at the
bottom of the screen. If you do, right click in this colored area
there is a option to make this area small medium or large.
2. If you hover your mouse at the boundry where the Detail Pane meets
the window pane above you'll see the cursor change to a double
headed vertical arrow. When you do, carefully grab it and drag it
up and you can make the Detail Plane much larger.
The detail pane is what it suggests it is. For example if you click on
a image you'll see a thumbnail that's proportional to the size you
made the Detail Pane along with the details about the image based on
what you told Explorer to show under options.
This has all changed from XP, so a little confusing. You control what
options show in Explorer in two ways. The over view in View on the
menu bar where you can toggle between changing the size of the icons
or showing a list or detail view.
But wait, there's a lot more...
Select thumbnail view. In the right page you should see thumbnails of
your images. Now in the right pane window in it's title bar it should
list the various columns you have slected. Example, name, date, takes,
size and so on. You can add many details by right clicking on a blank
space of this title bar to bring up a menu of more choices. There's
even a ranking system where you can rank your images with stars.
I didn't count them, but for images there are about 80 choices you can
pick from like artist, car phone #, country, a whole bunch of nice
things. Now all those you check get added to the detail view and as
you would expect you can add these details by images.
You then get to resort the order the details appear and as a bonus you
can sort by any column by just clicking on the column header. This
detail also appear in the Detail Pane.
So a very nice improvement over what XP offered.
For other file types you get details, again controlled by what YOU
select from the right pane of the window when you view files.
What you're probably referring to is if you hover off a icon on the
Task Bar this does create a mini thumbnail showing the details of what
that Windows contains. For example if I have Vegas running and it
shrunk down to the Task bar hovering over it shows a small by very
details view of all the controls that application has, the timeline,
all the tracks, etc..
