PDF Thumbnail Generator

Most explorer environments offer the possibility to set the view mode to icons of different size specifications, which more or less provide a small preview of content. These previews are known as thumbnails, and are also an important resource online. As such, PDF Thumbnail Generator allows you to create them for PDF documents.

A first good thing about it is that you’re saved the entire time and effort required to go through a setup process, so you can see what it’s all about as soon as download is done. Make sure your computer is fitted with .NET Framework, because it’s a mandatory requirement for functionality, even though it comes as a default feature in modern Windows iterations.

The visual design might leave you a little confused, with little tags to help you get started. There’s an empty field which needs to be filled in with the path of the target file, as well as a large section which is to display the thumbnail extracted from the PDF file. Note that you can’t drop the target file over the window, so you need to rely on the browse dialog.

Unfortunately, you’re only able to process a single file at a time, which might make thumbnail generation for all documents quite frustrating and time-consuming. What’s more, the process is manually performed, with no option to have files automatically saved once you load the PDF file of interest.

A small image is displayed in the preview section as soon as the PDF file is selected. However, only the first page of the document is used as a thumbnail, with no option to navigate and select a different one. Saving is only possible as a JPG file to a location of your choice.

Taking everything into consideration, we can state that PDF Thumbnail Generator isn’t really prepared to deliver the core function as expected. You can only process a file at a time, and there’s no possibility to use a different thumbnail than the first page of the target document.