In nice applications usage of thumbnails (or previews) of your pictures is a necessity. It speeds up things when you use small pictures to show small pictures instead of shrinking big pictures everytime.

Thumbnails generation in Microsoft Access can be done with one  line of code using AccessImagine.

So, lets take all the 3 steps to add thumbs to your pictures in some table.

1. Lets make some place for holding thumbs. Create a new field of OLE (or BLOB) type and call it Preview

2. Then make AccessImagine write a preview – add this line to the Exit event handler of control (lets assume its name is Picture1):

If Picture1.Changed Then Preview.Value = Picture1.PreviewJPG(128)

128 here means that the height (or width, if pic is landscape) will be 128 pixels. If you omit this number, then it will default to 64.

3. Then u need to… emm… Have we promised 3 steps for you? It was just a joke – we are done in two steps.

There is one note about previews here – they are generated at the moment user puts or changes image, so dont expect to generate previews for whole database with this two steps.