If you’re like many photographers with new Windows PCs, the first time you download Raw photos onto your computer you will see a discouraging screen similar to the one below. When you attempt to view your Raw files in Windows Explorer, a bunch of sad little rectangles stare sappily back at you like lost puppy dogs abandoned in a dark alley. Your poor Windows machine has searched near and far but has given up in finding a single snippet of software with which it can decode these infernal Raw files you have thrown at it. Don’t abandon hope, though. Before long, your Windows PC will be proudly displaying Raw files without a whimper of discontent.
While it’s true that you can manhandle Raw files in Windows using Lightoom and Photoshop without ever using Windows Explorer, sometimes you’d like to just take a quick peek at your thumbnails without involving the big guns. Earlier this year, Microsoft launched a utility to help you do just that. The Microsoft Camera Codec Pack will allow you to browse your Raw file thumbnails in Windows Explorer – just like they were JPEG files. You can also preview larger versions of the images quickly using Windows Photo Viewer.
One remaining downfall of this patch is that you still cannot view any EXIF data from your camera. Luckily, you can fix this using a free third party software called Exif Pilot. After installation, you can use Exif Pilot as a standalone program to browse Raw file thumbnail and view their Exif data. Perhaps a more useful mode, however, is to right click on any Raw file within Windows Explorer and select properties. You will now have a new menu tab called Exif Pilot. Just select this tab and you can view all the Exif data for your photo from right inside Windows Explorer.
Hopefully these tips will help your workflow. Now all of you explorers of light can go exploring your photos inside Windows Explorer!
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