Installation

• On Windows, you first have to install the Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2017: https://aka.ms/vs/15/release/vc_redist.x64.exe
• The rest of the installation works the same as with any other addon, as described in the Blender manual (open user preferences, choose "install from file", select the downloaded .zip archive, click open, enable the addon in the list)

Usage

Settings can be found in the user preferences by searching for "Image Node Preview" and clicking the arrow to the left of the addon entry.

• Thumbnail Scale: By default, thumbnails are fit into a square above the node that has the same size as the width of the node. You can make individual thumbnails smaller/larger by making the corresponding node wider/narrower. You can also scale all thumbnails down at once by using the "Thumbnail Scale" property
• Thumbnail Position: Thumbnails can be shown above the node or inside the node. In the latter case, the thumbnail scale setting is not used. This setting does not affect environment texture nodes and collapsed image texture nodes

Removing the Addon on Windows

Because this addon contains a .pyd shared library file which can't be deleted while loaded, you need to follow the steps below if you want to remove it from within the Blender user preferences:

•   Open the user preferences, navigate to the addon and disable the addon
•   Save the user preferences
•   Restart Blender
•   Open the user preferences again, navigate to the addon and press "Remove"

Known Problems

A bug in Blender is causing the message "Error: Not freed memory blocks: 8, total unfreed memory 0.012756 MB" to be printed in the console when Blender is closed.
For more details, see bug report https://developer.blender.org/T71362 
For most users this should not matter, it's only a cosmetic problem for people who do automated tests and will have this line printed in their console log.

Changelog

v1.7:

• The addon now shows previews for any node with an "image" attribute.
  This adds support for the new Octane image texture nodes, and makes the addon more future-proof.

v1.6:

• Added support for Blender 3.1

v1.5:

• Added support for Blender 2.93

v1.4:

• Added support for Blender 2.91 (fixes wrong gamma of thumbnails)

v1.3:

• Fixed filenames with non-latin characters (like äöü) not being loaded on Windows

v1.2:

• Added support for OpenEXR files
• Added support for Octane image nodes
• Images with landscape aspect ratio now use as much vertical space as possible when inside the node