Creating thumbnails from multi-page tiff page images

[Randy Trigg]

I'm trying to create small "thumbnail" images of the pages of a
multi-page tiff file.  So far, the best I've been able to do with PIL is
to convert from "1" to "L" and run the BLUR filter before scaling down
by a factor of 32 or so.  The results are okay at best.

So one question is, has anyone gotten PIL to generate nice thumbnails?

The second question is, does anyone know how Windows NT gets those great
thumbnails that it displays when you click on the Image tab of the
Properties dialog for a multi-page tiff file?  In the dialog, it's
called "preview" - they look gorgeous compared to what I can generate in
PIL.  Has anyone managed to invoke that kind of image previewing from
python?  Is there is a dll or COM interface for that bit of Windows?  (I
think that the Properties image previewing is done under the
explorer.exe process, but I'm not sure.)

Thanks in advance,

      - Randy