Thumbs Up To Ovie......

On the Sept 23 podcast of Cyberspeak Ovie Carroll talked about the thumbs cache that is new in Windows Vista. In response I have created a perl script with a autoit gui front end that will parse all 4 of the thumbcache files.

The base program is based on the sigs.pl script originally written by Harlan Carvey. What the perl script does is open the specified thumbscache files and then scans for file header signatures. Once it finds a jpg, png or bmp file header it then backs up and reads what I will call the file header record of that image file. In this record is the size and internal name of the file. I have not figured out how it gets that particular name but if someone knows please let all of us know. The thumbcache_32 and 96 files appear to only contain bmp files while the thumbcache_256 and 1024 contain png and jpg's. For all the gory details see the perl code.

Since the thumbcache files I had were very limited this is about as much as I know. As for the gui just pick the file you want to parse, input the directory with a "\" as the end where the thumbcache files are and input a directory to write all the images to and click on the parse button and watch it go.

Now since this does not use any windows specific perl modules there is no reason that you cannot run it on Linux or a Mac. The code and executable can be found here.

Thanks to Ovie for the idea for this program. Ovie and Bret keep up the great work on the podcast.

As always questions/comments/thoughts/problems let me know. My eyes and ears are always looking for great new projects.