

ArcThumb
A Windows Explorer shell extension for showing cover thumbnails and preview-pane previews of archive and ebook files, written in Rust.
Cost / License
- Free
- Open Source (Apache-2.0)
Platforms
- Windows
- File Explorer
Features
Properties
- Lightweight
Features
- Works Offline
- Ad-free
- Supports RAR files
- No registration required
- Supports Zip files
Windows Explorer Extension
- Rust
ArcThumb News & Activities
Recent activities
- citrussoda liked ArcThumb
- citrussoda added ArcThumb
- citrussoda added ArcThumb as alternative to DarkThumbs
ArcThumb information
What is ArcThumb?
ArcThumb is a lightweight Windows shell extension that extracts the first image — or the actual cover — from archive and ebook files and displays it as the file's thumbnail in Windows Explorer.
Supported archive formats include ZIP, RAR, 7Z, and their comic book variants CBZ, CBR, CB7, and CBT. For ebooks, ArcThumb handles EPUB, FB2, MOBI, AZW, and AZW3, parsing each format's metadata (OPF manifest for EPUB, coverpage reference for FB2, EXTH 201 CoverOffset for Kindle formats) to pick the correct cover rather than an arbitrary embedded image.
ArcThumb also implements IPreviewHandler, so the same cover image appears in Explorer's preview pane (Alt+P) at full resolution. A small configuration GUI lets you toggle supported extensions, choose sort order, set cover-name preferences, and switch the UI language between English and Japanese.
The extension installs per-user under %LOCALAPPDATA% with no admin rights required and no system-wide registry changes. Image formats supported inside archives are JPEG, PNG, GIF, BMP, TIFF, ICO, and WebP.
ArcThumb is inspired by CBX Shell and DarkThumbs, rewritten from scratch in Rust with modern Windows 10/11 support.



