Overview

Quick Summary

Better Thumbnail Browser is a WinForms control for displaying and loading (mostly) image thumbnails. The control is written from scratch entirely in C#.

Better Thumbnail Browser inherits from a successful and mature Better ListView control.

Viewing and loading image thumbnails can be a sophisticated task, so this control is designed to do these things for you:

Scan folder on disk and load images.
Load images from any source you want (e.g. database) with minimum coding needed.
Perform all the thread operations and thread synchronization for you.
Resize images.
Always load viewed thumbnails first, then all other in the predefined order.
Allow starting, stopping and restarting the loading on demand.

It has been designed to completely replace the regular .NET list view control, and it comes with many additional features, improvements and better native look and feel (including Aero support).

Features

Automatic loading of image thumbnails from a selected folder on the disk.
Handles multithreaded loading for you, no extra coding needed for synchronization.
Support for custom loading providers, custom loading order and multi-pass loading.
Viewing image thumbnails of arbitrary size, with customized borders and paddings.
High-quality image resampling.
Support for smart loading: Thumbnails in the view can be loaded first, then all other.
Thumbnail zooming on the fly.
Inherits many features from Better ListView control (for example: Multi-column sorting, Multi-line text, Groups, Three-state check boxes and much more).

Compatibility

Compatible with: Visual Studio 2012, 2008, 2005 (and newer), with full designer support.
For C#, Visual Basic .NET (VB.NET), managed C++, and other CLI languages.
Compatible with .NET 4.5, 4.0 and 4.0 Client Profile, 3.5 and 3.5 Client Profile, 3.0, 2.0, and newer.
Runs on Windows 8, 7, Vista, 2003, XP, 2000, and newer, both 32-bit and 64-bit.

Benefits

Inherits from powerful Better ListView control, which has more features and fixes all quirks of the regular .NET ListView control.
Fully managed, 100% C# code. No more Win32 API.
Minimum learning needed.
Single DLL file with simple XCOPY deployment, royalty-free.
Great native look and feel (including Aero support).

Because Better Thumbnail Browser is written entirely from scratch in pure managed code, it adds functionality hardly achievable by just wrapping the regular .NET WinForms control. Such features include image thumbnails, data binding, multi-line items ... and more!

The Better Thumbnail Browser source code consists of a single C# project without any external dependencies, it is clean, readable, fully commented and readily extensible.

You can save time with many of the inbuilt features (sorting, item reordering...).