Dynamically show Preview Pane when there's a preview available

[mattisdada]

Dynamically show Preview Pane when there's a preview available

I'm not sure if this is even possible to do at an application level, might require Windows feature update. But effectively, I do want previews for MD/SVGs like this PowerToy does, but I don't want an empty "Preview Pane" taking up space the entire time, and I certainly don't want it to be showing "No preview available" that's such a waste of space and just genuinely annoying, that I turn preview panes off as a whole. Making the MD/SVG previews useless :(

Proposed implementation details

• Configured via a setting flag
• When selecting a file, check to see if a valid previewer exists, if it does enable the preview pane
• Disable it when clicking off the item

Might be possible to do this with some registry magic, but that seems a bit hacky... I haven't looked into the Windows APIs to see if there's a better way of handling this

[crutkas]

This would be 🔥🔥🔥🔥!

[lewisakura]

Having this feature would actually make the Preview Pane so much more useful. Unfortunately, having a bunch of dead space that you can't reclaim (unless you turn off the Pane or resize it) is... well... dead space that you can't reclaim. I would love to use the entire File Explorer whilst this feature is on, but I don't want a massive empty gap that says Select a file or Preview is not available. That's wasted space that I could be using to look at my thousands of pictures of my cat.

That last bit isn't a joke by the way. I actually do have that many pictures. But they're MY cat photos!! No peeking. :eyes:

This feature request is a must-have for the next version of PowerToys. :+1: