Windows Shell Extension for Krita Files

[Alvin Wong]

Hi all,

I am making a Windows Explorer shell extension for Krita files, which
I hope would eventually be good enough to be included in the Krita for
Windows installer starting from 3.x releases.

For those who are not familiar with Windows (and actually, I'm not
really,) shell extensions provides various information that the shell
(aka Explorer) and other progams can use to present to users. Typical
examples include: file thumbnails, previews, metadata (properties),
dynamically-selected file icons, context menus.

In the shell extension that I am working on, I plan to include support
for at least (but not limited to) file thumbnails, properties and
icons. Here I'll try to list out what they could do:

- File thumbnails: Providing thumbnails for Krita files, obviously.
- Properties: Information like image dimensions and colour depth can
be extracted from the file for Explorer to display them in file
tooltip (InfoTip), the preview details pane, as a column in details
view, and so on. It could also possibly be used by Windows Search,
although I haven't investigated this yet.
- Icons: It could provide different icons with a badge representing
different colour depths, or whether a file has animations in it, for
example.

I already have one with a working thumbnail provider. You can check it
here: https://github.com/alvinhochun/KritaShellExtension  I've only
tested it on my only Windows 7 64-bit environment by the way, so any
testing on any other systems would be appreciated.

I'll be looking forward to your comments!

All the best,

Alvin Wong