Quick Icon Thumbnails

In order to quickly create a thumbnail icon for images I've been a long time fan of the great freeware contextual menu extension QuickImageCM. Simply right-click the icon and choose QuickImage:Add Thumbnail Icon and you have a great thumbnail icon. However despite its convenience, QuickImage suffers from a few problems. For slower Macs with a few contextual menu items installed there can be a delay of a few seconds before the menu appears. This delay increases with the number of icons selected, so if you try and right-click a selection of a few hundred images, the delay can run into minutes, during which you cannot do anything else while waiting for the menu to appear. This is extremely frustrating, so I set out to find a drag and drop solution.

Enter the $15 shareware DropIcon - this app is a good solution for the problem. This software hasn't been updated since 2001, but it seems to work well on OS X 10.3.5. I've tested it with over 500 images at a time without any problems, except a few images (perhaps 1 in 100) end up with erroneous black and white thumbnails. Running DropIcon on these problem images again did not fix the problem. I ended up using QuickImage on them to get the correct thumbnails.

Update: I recently discovered a program called dropBatch iconMaker. Apparently it's highly regarded.