The other day I took the plunge, departed with $15 USD, and bought FastPictureViewer Codec Pack for Windows 7 x64. I couldn’t be happier.

Now a tonne of other formats can now finally be viewed natively in Windows 7 x64 Explorer.

Relevant formats for Maya users that are supported:

Adobe Photoshop CS (.psd, .pdd)
Autodesk Maya (.iff)
Open EXR (.exr)
Radiance HDR (.hdr)
Truevision Targa (.tga, .tpic, .vda, .icb, .vst)
Tagged Image File Format (.tiff)
DirectX DDS (.dds)

Not to mention my Canon 7D RAW files are finally viewable and most other RAW formats are supported too. For a more comprehensive list of supported formats, there is one here.

As far as I know it is possible to enable some of these thumbnails in Windows 32bit via some hacks, but as of this post I haven’t seen anything able to get it to work if you are on a 64 bit system. I tried.

I should also probably mention I’m plugging this without any affiliation or incentive for these guys, I just think it is the most useful $15 USD I’ve spent on software to be honest.

Also one less reason to keep on using Adobe Bridge!

June 2011 Update

The pack has been updated to support Maya .iff files