Extract high resolution icon or thumbnail for file

Question

I'm trying to get a high resolution icon or thumbnail in Windows given a full path to that file. Doesn't need to be a thumbnail — a good looking Icon will be great. I Don't care if it's an HICON or an HBITMAP: I'm going to put it in a GDI+ object and render it into a device context.

I've tried using SHGetFileInfo (with various variations on flags), but never get more than a ~32x32 icon back, which scales horribly to the 128 pixels or so that I need.

if (!SHGetFileInfoW(path, 0, &fi, sizeof(fi),
                    SHGFI_ICON | SHGFI_ICONLARGE | SHGFI_TYPENAME))
    return GetLastError();

// fi.hIcon is a valid icon here, but it's horrible quality with
// a black mask on it. I want higher quality, and dare I dream of
// alpha channel? Mask is acceptable, i suppose.

SHGetFileInfo returns "" when I call with SHGFI_ICONLOCATION (which appears to be a known problem with that API).

I've also tried using SHCreateItemFromParsingName name with the intention of getting IThumbnailProvider, but BindToHandler always returns E_NOTIMPL for BHID_ThumbnailHandler ...

IShellItem *psi;
hr = SHCreateItemFromParsingName(path, NULL, IID_PPV_ARGS(&psi));
if (SUCCEEDED(hr))
{
    IThumbnailProvider *pThumbProvider;
    hr = psi->BindToHandler(NULL, BHID_ThumbnailHandler,
                            IID_PPV_ARGS(&pThumbProvider));
    if (SUCCEEDED(hr))
    { 
    // never get here because hr == E_NOTIMPL !!!

I've actually run the Microsoft Thumbnail Providers Sample and found that it suffers from the same problem with BindToInterface.

So, any suggestions on what else I could try? I just want something picture-y that more or less represents this file at, say, at least 100px size — just anything better than 32x32 ...

Extract high resolution icon or thumbnail for file

2 Answers