Tonight I was asked for help in creating custom thumbnail swatches to go with recoloured picture frames by the very same person who inspired the custom image sharpness post here. Since I’ve been so lazy procrastinating about creating custom thumbnails for my CC (which I’ve only now just gotten around to doing), I figured I may as well post a how-to on the subject. At least that way there’s no excuses for next time (unless I’m still procrastinating which, knowing me, is highly possible…)

This is a stripped-down version of the original guide found at Sims 4 Studio – all credit goes to OrangeMittens, Andrew, Bakie, and the rest of the crew at S4S for this. I just abbreviated it and added my own tips and observations at the end. There’s also instructions on what to do if you’re experiencing transparent swatches in Sims 4 Studio.

==============================================================

1. Put your .package file in your usual Mods folder.  Load your game.
2. In the build/buy catalog, look at every swatch entry for your object. This will automatically generate thumbnails in S4S. You’re not placing the object in world, you’re just hovering your mouse cursor over and looking at each recolour from the buy catalog. (If you buy it and place it in-world and then try to change the colours that way, this won’t generate thumbnails). That’s it. Then close your game.
3. Open your .package file in S4S. 
4. Click each numbered swatch to see the newly generated thumbnails (they will appear under the Catalog Thumbnail box).
5. Export thumbnail #1 and save to desktop.
6. Open thumbnail #1 in Gimp (or other picture editing software).
7. Add a new layer. Create text in this new layer – anything to identify it as “yours” (This will show up over the top of your thumbnails in the buy catalog – In the example above I chose the text RLH).
8. Hide or delete the original thumbnail image so only text (or your identifying mark) is showing.
9. Save (or use the option ‘Export As’ if you’re using Gimp) as a .png. Close Gimp. 
10. Return to S4S. Click on the Tools tab > Modding > Catalog Thumbnail Overlay.
11. Navigate to your .png and select it.
12. You should then see your .png image over the top of all your custom thumbnails for each swatch.
13. Save .package and return it to your Mods folder. Load game to test.

What to do if your thumbnail swatches are transparent.

The easiest thing you should do is try clearing your Thumbnail Cache – this will force the game to generate new ones (so don’t worry about screwing up your game). To do this, go into S4S > Tools > Clear Thumbnail Cache, or try deleting the file localthumbs.cache from your Documents\Electronic Arts\The Sims 4 folder (both methods do the same thing, they’re just different ways of doing it). Then restart your game.

After loading, repeat steps #1 – 4 listed as above: look at each recolour swatch from the buy catalog in game, and then going back into S4S and see if they show up this time. If they do, repeat the rest of the steps to create custom thumbnails. If they don’t, make sure S4S is looking for them in the right place.

Open S4S > Settings. Next to where it says Sims 4 Documents, make sure the path that follows reads Documents\Electronic Arts\The Sims 4 and NOT Documents\Electronic Arts\The Sims 4 folder\Mods, or anything else.

If you’re still having problems, try this step here. Hopefully that solves it, and you should now have some professional looking thumbnails showing over your recolours in your game.

TIP: Instead of having to recreate the .png overlay for every recolour project (the overlay created in step #9), save it somewhere handy so you can use it again (unless you plan on changing your overlay design). That way for all future recolours you can bypass steps #5 – 9 as you already have an image created. You will still need to do steps #1 – 4, and #10 – 13 (generating thumbnails in game, and applying the overlays respectively) for each project, but applying the same .png will save time as catalog thumbnails are the same size and your .png will fit every project from here on out.

As always, good luck! 🙂