I’ve been working on this tool that puts thumbnail previews for STL files into your file explorer, and I think it’s finally ready to share. It works on both Windows and Linux (even the Raspberry Pi). It’s pretty fast since it uses the GPU for rendering.
I hope everyone finds this useful. Please let me know what you think.
Seems to fail for me on windows 7, just uses up 100% CPU and no thumbs show up…
haha, fails on install. Gets to the point of installing the C++ redistributable, and errors out with, essentially “this is already installed”.
@Tyler_Anderson sure. I did directly open my main folder of 3D models, which where a lot. But I would have expected thumbs to slowly start to show up.
I do have an Intel Mobility 3000 GPU, which can be picky on OpenGL.
What can I do to provide more information?
I just installed it on Arch Linux. Works great with Nemo. Thanks a lot 
hello, thank you for sharing this, it has been a long time since i’ve been expecting something like this. a big thumbs up from me. ps it works perfect with windows 10
I’ll test on Windows 8.1 in 2 weeks. I’m on holiday 
Thanks everyone!
@Daid_Braam , can you run the program from the command line and post the output? Here is an example.
cd folderWithSTLs
“C:\Program Files\stl-thumb\stl-thumb.exe” -vv something.stl something.png
@ThantiK , the installer is supposed to detect whether or not you have the redistributable and only install it if necessary. I’m not sure why it’s not seeing it in your case. Can you post the exact text of the error message?
There you go.
Windows 10 keeps installing other apps to associate with .stl files. I have uninstalled numerous Microsoft apps and it keeps popping up new ones. 
This tool is a great idea as long as Microsoft is not intervening. Perhaps it’s trying to save me from unsigned programs.
I think this doesn’t use the file association, as I could still open STL files normally after installing this. And it still tried to create previews.
In my installment Windows keeps showing the associated icon from the installed programs and not the information from this tool.
Very good!!!
@Peter_Peters Sometimes Windows does not get triggered to generate the new icons. Try using the Disk Cleanup utility to delete the thumbnail cache.
Awesome
works fine on Windows 8.1
Installed fine for me (64 Bit Win 10). It’s a little slow to populate even on a folder with just 20-30 stls in, but it’ still really useful - Thanks!
It didn’t associate itself to STL for me, but it did break my old association (easily recoupled).
Works great on Debian!
Very good idea sir!
