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For those of you who are currently using Windoze 7 and have had been continually annoyed by having to either keep a jpg or preview your images in another program, microsoft has finally come to the party. They have released a camera codec pack to enable us all to view our raw files with previews within explorer....

http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=26829

Thanks for that Cameron. I've downloaded it but not sure how much I'll use it because all my RAW files should be in Lightroom.

Murray Foote wrote:Thanks for that Cameron. I've downloaded it but not sure how much I'll use it because all my RAW files should be in Lightroom.

I dont use lightroom, but I also keep an JPG of all my RAW files so I guess I have not gained much.....unless i go back and kill the JPG's

I use Fastpictureviewer. It cost about $14 and does everything it says it does. Raw files look great and it is fast. It works brilliantly.

http://www.fastpictureviewer.com/

I used to FastStone Viewer

http://www.faststone.org/FSViewerDetail.htm

Ive always been able to view raw files in windows7. I bought a codec for a few bucks when i first installed w7 ages ago. I thought i may have got that from here but musta been from another forum.

Does the x64 version from Microsoft mean its for a 64 bit computer?

I assume that all the codec does is display the JPEG embedded in the raw file*. I don't know why it has taken them so long to make this available. It isn't rocket science. The Mac does it by default.

* It doesn't make any sense to display anything other than the embedded JPEG as if it was to actually convert the raw data, what settings would it use? It would also mean the codec would have to be updated with just about every new camera.

only handy if you run 64bit. Otherwise just use the nikon 32bit codec, or better still look at a third party one (fastpictureviewer etc).

Note: Microsoft raw viewer shows only unedited NEF files.

ATJ wrote:It would also mean the codec would have to be updated with just about every new camera.

and the software giant has confirmed that it is actively working on additional codecs for release "as soon as they're available".

biggerry wrote:

and the software giant has confirmed that it is actively working on additional codecs for release "as soon as they're available".

Perhaps they are referring to other camera makers.

My Mac could display the D7000 raw files from day one, even though the format changed. Lightroom 2 could display thumbnails from the D7000 raw files (reading the JPEG) but didn't know how to handle the raw data.

barry wrote:Does the x64 version from Microsoft mean its for a 64 bit computer?

Yep