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Revit Thumbnails Are Outdated - Improve Revit Family Thumbnails
Revit thumbnails for families and projects are outdated and not useful compared to other software like SketchUp or Rhino. They do not display materials, textures, or shading, making it hard to identify families visually. Please improve the thumbnail engine to support realistic previews with materials and lighting.
Change the default behavior of thumbnails, especially for families. For the thumbnail, it would be great to turn off the reference planes and reference lines, hide dimensions, and turn on Preview Visibility. That way a maximized version of the family is saved instead of a blurry green crosshair that is useless. It is time-consuming to manually go into each family, turn these items off, turn on Preview Visibility, and save the file just to get a clean thumbnail for users to see. It would be great if the thumbnail could be clearer too.
Although it is already the 2025 version, the quality of the thumbnail preview is still very poor, making it difficult to select and preview files. I hope the Revit team will improve the visual preview feature to be more intuitive, similar to SketchUp.
-if we set up the family facing backwards than the native developers idea, for some reason, the thumbnail gets strange... and it's not editable like the preview when saving the family that we can see in Windows Explorer.
-when we have a circle line (model or 2D doesn't mater) in the family to indicate the influence radious like in sprinklers or firefigher hoses, it is taken into account in the thumbnail preview - meaning we can't see anything in the thumbnail if that radious is big as it should... I don't recall if marking it as invisible did the trick or if I have to load the family with a small radious and changing the value back when the family was already loaded in the project - but I think it was the latest - witch means that if anybody reloads the family may be changing that value again to the wrong default if they are not aware of this issue.
The behaviour should be just like the Windows Explorer preview (that could also improve too - but that is another topic) - editable and controlable!
Guess my previous comment was just merged with another idea...
Just to clarify... My comments were referening to the family thumbnails we see in the properties window when we have a project or family open - not the thumbnails from the home window of revit like in the posted image above before opening any file...
Thumbnails would do good with some improvements, especially for families with a lot of info and connectors. For projects, however, I find more value in a thumbnail with text that just shows the project name, and maybe the revit version.
Although it would be good to improve the thumbnail qualities all around, there is two things that can help in the meantime.
#1. Using Content Catalog.
#2. Using CTC BIM Manager Suite's Family Preview Manager. It is one of the free tools available from CTC. Always worked well for me before moving to Content Catalog.
Has there been any update for this? It's making it very difficult to use Content Catalog, the images are such low resolution it's completely useless...
@dfoxPQ2S9, I'm not sure what you're looking at in Content Catalog. There are some families that are not the greatest images... I'm trying to figure out why some are better than others, but for the most part, they have great image quality IMO. See attached short mp4 file showing several of my families and their thumbnails in Content Catalog.
The one kinda blurry sink is actually a manufacturers family, so I blame them... haha.
I did not get it in the video, but when I take a look at the 3d view of that sink family, the 3d view is actually really, really good. The sink is chrome (apparently) and looks really good in the 3d view.
I'm hoping the video eventually processes and works for you.
I did not show the thumbnail of our project starter files, because admittedly it shows the starter sheet, which those never show up great. I mean, those sheets are really detailed and large, so I'm not upset by that. If you don't know what a project file is based on it's file name, an image of the sheet isn't really going to help much anyhow.
And to answer your question, currently for us, most of the thumbnails either display oddly in terms of linework or it's generally pixelated (I had to blur out the text from my end for privacy) I have attached both images for ref
@dfoxPQ2S9, a couple of those don't look too bad to me, but most of those do look a bit... not good. 🙂
Are these families that were uploaded a while ago (like over a year ago), because they did have issues with this for a while, but they got most of those issues fixed and supposedly the images were supposed to automatically get better.
I'm going to do a little testing and a little asking to see if I can figure out some things to make these things better for everyone. I have a couple ideas, but this is purely guesses at this point and I actually want to try it out with a few of my families also.
I'm wondering if some of this has to do with the family line weights and possibly also the 3d view (where it grabs the image from) view scale.... perhaps in combination. I'm going to test this a bit and see what happens.
These were uploaded within the last 3 months. The stairs for instance, were uploaded 2 weeks ago. The 3D views within the file look fine, only with the thumbnail it looks odd.
Also, the 3D orbiting functionality almost never works
@dfoxPQ2S9, that stupid "You have reached the limit for private messages..." is such a pain in the butt!
As far as that error that you're getting though, have you put in a support ticket with Autodesk yet because that is not normal. I have uploaded many drafting views at one time with no issues what's so ever. I have inserted several drafting views at one time with no issues.
@dfoxPQ2S9, yea, I believe that image on their help site is from their Unify days or something. I'm not sure, because I don't remember seeing those in there ever. We've complained about the list of icons and they haven't done anything yet. Yet another minor annoyance that needs updated. Believe it or not we had even worse icons before. That's the updated list we have since October last year. Version 4.0.95 is when that list got updated.
@dfoxPQ2S9, the saved searches never had the ability to have custom icons that I know of... those were just some that were there that no longer are... I really don't understand why. Where did those icons go?
