Add view preview thumbnails to project browser

[Anonymous]

When working on a project with many views, especially 3D views, it can take a while to locate the one view we want to work on or see in detail. Naming conventions go a long way to alleviate this issue but are not enough.

I propose that Revit could generate thumbnail previews for each view and show these as a tooltip when hovering the mouse pointer over view items in the Project Browser (see attached mock up).

This feature would be fairly straight forward to implement. Revit needs to take a snapshot of the current view when the view is being closed or dismissed in some other way, such as switching to a different view. That snapshot then becomes the thumbnail preview for that view. The thumbnails don't need to be large but a range of sizes should be offered as a customisation option (small, medium, large). These could be displayed on mouse-over as a tooltip or in line next to the view item in the Project Browser (similarly to how image editing apps show thumbnails of layers).

[rbrinkman]

I was just wishing for this in a project that has lots of sheets so it's hard to remember exactly which one you need. Opening each sheet is too slow.

Great Idea! Glad someone else had the idea and it has gained traction

[nmarcelis]

@ABDULLAHGAMAL137isn't this a view naming problem?

[lionel.kai]

I usually have to flip through the PDF to find the sheet I need, as opening Sheets in Revit is too slow - it WOULD be nice to have some kind of preview image for those... though personally I don't think I would use preview images for the Views nearly as often (I'm usually looking for a view based on where it's cut, not what it looks like) - maybe an option in the file on whether to store previews or not (similar to the option for stored thumbnails in a PDF)? Though now that I think about it, it might be nice to have a preview in a tooltip when selecting the target view of a View Reference... I like to confirm that I'm getting the correct view.

For implementation, I suspect that they would need to be "pre-rendered" and stored in the file as images - otherwise it would likely severely impact model opening time. The problem then would be when would Revit update the preview? Every time a view changes? Not likely - right now it only does open views... and that can become a performance issue if you have too many open. If it's done with every sync, it will slow that time down. And if done manually, it might not be often enough to make the previews useful... and developing an algorithm to determine when a view's thumbnail needs to be updated would certainly be labeled as "non-trivial" by the developers (since that was their response to adding an additional alignment option for Beam Systems - which would be a MUCH simpler algorithm).

[lionel.kai]

Also, I'm not sure how the "multiple Project Browser windows" ideas got combined with the "thumbnails for views" idea...? "Autodesk" is always saying we should create separate posts for each idea!

[brandonD853N]

It would be nice to preview the details/views from the project browser by hovering over their title. Currently, we need to click on or drag the detail/view to see the contents. 

Thank you!

[jason.m.mckenna]

I think this is a great idea, I would like to see this for sheets as well. Views and Sheets. You can hover over a layout tab in AutoCAD and see a preview of it, it works great.

Thank you for suggesting this Preview Idea for project browser!

[Semion_MEA]

2017 - 2025, Still no Preview Option - Classic Autodesk. 🙉