Monthly Archives: March 2025

Extracting OLE thumbnails using Access OLE Export / SQL Blob Export

Access OLE Export / SQL Blob Export version 7.9 onwards has an option to extract OLE thumbnails from OLE-Object fields.

There are a couple of situations where this is useful.

  1. A linked OLE-Object image file may no longer be available, but a thumbnail was stored.  You can now at least extract the thumbnail.
  2. You only need the image and not the entire file.  For example, you may only need the thumbnail images from an Origin project files.  Exporting the thumbnails gives us the image, without needing to first export the project file, open it, then save the image to disk.

Download the latest version of Access OLE Export / SQL Blob Export and experience how you can easily export OLE thumbnails.

Extracting OLE thumbnails using SQL Image Viewer

When viewing OLE-Object data in a database using SQL Image Viewer, a thumbnail of the embedded OLE object is displayed if one is available.

From SQL Image Viewer 12.5, you can now extract these thumbnails in addition to the OLE object that’s stored.  To do this, select the Extract OLE thumbnails option during the export process.

There are a couple of situations where this is useful.

  1. A linked OLE-Object image file may no longer be available, but a thumbnail was stored.  You can now at least extract the thumbnail.
  2. You only need the image and not the entire file.  In the above example, the embedded OLE objects are Origin project files.  If we only need the image from the project, exporting the thumbnails gives us the image, without needing to first export the project file, open it, then save the image to disk.

Download the latest version of SQL Image Viewer using this link.