Windows software to view thumbnail(s) inside JPG files

Question

Please recommend software to view the thumbnail(s) stored within the metadata inside JPG (JPEG) image files.

I'm not referring to creating thumbnails; instead I'm referring to viewing any thumbnails already stored within the metadata.

Must be Windows 7 compatible and gratis.

Answer 1

You can use ExifTool to extract the thumbnail (if any) from a Jpeg Image, (as opposed to generating one from the image data).

The command:

exiftool -b -ThumbnailImage image.jpg > thumbnail.jpg

Will extract (as binary -b option) the thumbnail (-ThumbnailImage command) from image.jpg and the output will be piped by > to thumbnail.jpg all from the command line.

ExifTool is:

• Free, Gratis & Open Source
• Written in Perl but available as a binary download for Windows or a package for OS-X
• Cross Platform including Windows "All Versions" but I haven't tried a recent build on 3.1 or XP, OS-X, Linux, etc.
• Supports extracting the meta data from lots of file formats
• Support adding, changing or removing metadata from nearly as many file formats.
• Is very fast and powerful.
• Supports renaming the exe file, (or equivalent), to make a shortcut that you can drop files on to do frequent operations.
• If you do anything with photographs you should have a copy.