Lennaert Ekelmans

I'm Lennaert Ekelmans, The Netherlands, 22 years old, serial entrepreneur, web developer, CakePHP'er, hobby-photographer and trance-addict.

Since April I've a blog, read here why.

Getting Canon RAW thumbnails in Windows 7

Trying out the latest Windows 7 is quite awesome. The day Windows Vista was released I slept in front of the store so I could install Windows Vista immediately on my computer. Now Microsoft will release later this year the even more awesome Windows 7. I won't bore you with the new features because there are plenty of blogs who already talk about it.

Photography is one of my hobbies and because I want a quick overview of my photos without using external software to see them I previously always shot both in RAW and JPG. In that case I could see the JPG thumbnails so I knew which CR2 file I had to open with Photoshop. I still can remember a photoshop trick with Windows XP and the first Adobe Photoshop CS version where you just had to copy a DLL file to a shell folder in the Adobe Common group. Windows 7 has by default a RAW viewer, but since I'm shooting with a Canon 5D Mark II it's still not compatible with the Windows Raw viewer. I searched for several hours on the Internet however the solution is pretty simple. Canon supplies software and it's called the Canon RAW Codec (1.5). It's made for Windows XP but it's also working on a Windows 7 machine.

Canon Software Drivers > Cameras > EOS 5D Mark II > Canon RAW Codec (1.5).

After installing the Canon RAW codec I'm able to browse with Windows Explorer through all my photos and I'm able to view thumbnails from CR2 files of the Canon EOS 5D Mark II. Keep your Adobe Photoshop up to date because with last updates they also supported the 5D Mark II CR2 files. The solution is incredible easy but nobody told me so far how to get CR2 raw files as thumbnails in my Windows 7. Have fun on your Windows 7 machine!