Generally speaking I have been really pleased with my Canon EOS 550D. The images from the camera blow away anything I could manage with my older IXUS 220IS, however one of the niggles is with RAW images and in particular viewing thumbnails in Windows 7 (x64) – they simply refuse to show – take a look at the image, JPG files are fine but CR2 (RAW) images don’t show at all.

The Windows 7 compatibility center reports “No action required” for 64-bit Windows so it was curious that thumbnails do not show. A visit to the Canon software download site hints at a clue, the Canon RAW Codec is says “64-bit Operating systems are not supported” – although the 32-bit version did download and install. I also downloaded the Adobe CS5 RAW Codec but it didn’t help either.

As a starting point I discovered FastStone Image Viewer, currently up to version 4.3. FastStone Image Viewer is a downloadable application, free for personal and educational use which does a pretty good job of showing CR2 thumbnails in its own viewer. However, it would still be useful to be able to view thumbnails of CR2 directly within Windows 7 Explorer.

The next step was to take a look at Microsoft RAW Image Thumbnailers and Viewer for Windows XP to see if this might help. This does require the .NET framework 1.1 but this simply refused to install.

Google Picasa 3 next and whilst this did a great job of viewing the .CR2 files within it’s own application it didn’t provide thumbnails in Explorer.

One thing I found was that Windows Live Photo Gallery would open the images. By setting this application as the default viewer then opening one of the images (double-clicking on it), then clicking on Edit, organize, or share the thumbnails started to appear. It’s a bit of a work around, and could be linked to installing the 32-bit Canon Codec mentioned above (but I can’t be sure) – but if you just want to see .CR2 thumbnails – it seems to work.

Resources and Further Reading

• Microsoft: Windows 7 Compatibility Center
• Canon: EOS 550D Downloads
• Google:
• FastStone: FastStone Image Viewer