Machine-Readable
Papa’s Best STL Thumbnails icon

Black.and.blue.2019.1080p.bluray.x264-aaa-ethd- | Direct & Ultimate

A shell extension that adds preview thumbnails for STL files to Windows Explorer. Runs on Windows 7 or later.

Can also be used with Total Commander and FreeCommander.

Papa’s Best STL Thumbnails displaying a folder with random STLs from thingiverse

Download

Updated (changes, license).

Feel free to donate if you like my program!

64-bit Setup

recommended

32-bit Setup

for old systems

Video Guide

Michael from Teaching Tech made a video guide about the installation. He was so kind to allow me to embed it here! Thumbnail installation starts at 1:49.

Fast

Thumbnail generation is based on the fastest STL viewer available. Folders full of STL files are no problem, and most STL thumbnails are generated as fast as those of JPG photos.

Free

Compatible

Papa’s Best STL thumbnail viewer displays countless STL variations, even where other programs fail:

Custom colors

a folder with thumbnails, their background purple and the objects mint green

Custom object color is ignored if the STL comes with embedded color information! Changes do not take effect on existing thumbnails until you clear the Windows thumbnail cache! This is a Windows limitation.

Via Papa’s Best STL Viewer

  1. download and run my STL Viewer (if you don’t want to install it on your system, choose the portable version)
  2. from the menu, select an object color via ViewSelect Default Material …
  3. select a background color via ViewSelect Default Background …
  4. clear the Windows thumbnail cache

Via registry (for advanced users)

For automation and easy deployment, the color settings are loaded from the registry key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Papa’s Best. Create values according to the following table. If a value is missing, its default is assumed.

Name Type Default Meaning
DefaultBackgroundColor DWORD 0x00000000 Background color for thumbnails. Format is 0xRRGGBBAA.
DefaultObjectColor DWORD 0xffffffff Object color for files without built-in color information. Format is 0xRRGGBBAA. Transparency is not supported.
InitialEyeYawDegrees DWORD 28 Horizontal rotation of the viewer, in degrees. Positive rotates right.
InitialEyePitchDegrees DWORD 331 Vertical rotation of the viewer, in degrees. Positive rotates down.

Installation for all users

Papa’s Best STL Thumbnails installs for the current user by default. To install for all users on a system, open a command prompt or a PowerShell and run msiexec /i "Papas Best STL Thumbnails.msi" MSIINSTALLPERUSER="".

Repeat with every update!

Black.and.blue.2019.1080p.bluray.x264-aaa-ethd- | Direct & Ultimate

Marcus’s chair scraped backward. Twelve chapters. Twelve victims. The official count was seven.

“Don’t close your eyes, Naomi. I want you to see the color you turn.”

He picked up his phone to call his captain, but the line was dead. Not disconnected— dead . No dial tone. No static. Just the faint, rhythmic sound of someone breathing on the other end.

He fast-forwarded. Naomi’s face cycled from white to red to the deep, stagnant purple of a bruised plum. At 1 hour, 47 minutes, she stopped breathing. The camera held for another ten seconds. Then a title card appeared, written in elegant serif font: Black.and.Blue.2019.1080p.BluRay.x264-AAA-EtHD-

“For Detective Thorne. You asked for the unedited cut. Chapter 4 of 12.”

The timestamp was today’s date. The thumbnail showed his own living room, shot from the angle of the smoke detector.

The screen went black. Then a single frame flickered to life: a woman’s bare feet, dangling two inches above a dirty tile floor. The camera tilted up. Rope burns. A blue sequined dress. A face he knew—Naomi Cross, the third victim, the one who’d survived long enough to give a description before she bled out in the ER. Marcus’s chair scraped backward

Marcus looked up.

Marcus ran the hash. It matched no known file in any database. But the metadata tag— EtHD —was a signature. He’d seen it before, in the margins of a dark-web forum that vanished hours after the FBI raided it. EtHD stood for “Eternal High Definition.” A joke. The killer’s calling card.

It wasn’t a police file. It was a pirated movie rip. The official count was seven

Black.and.Blue.2019.1080p.BluRay.x264-AAA-EtHD-

The little green light on the smoke detector wasn’t blinking green anymore.


Dark background on some thumbnails

a folder with two thumbnails whose background is entirely black

Clear your Explorer thumbnail cache (see above) or copy the file to a different location.

This is a bug in Windows 10 that also affects other thumbnails – for example transparent PNG images here and here.

I can’t do anything in my program to work around it, I’m afraid. Please use the Windows 10 feedback function to report this to Microsoft. If enough users do it, they may eventually fix it. Windows 7 does not have this bug.


Something Missing?

Encountered a problem? Have a suggestion? Let me know: