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Missing or blank thumbnails

A plugin has no thumbnail at all

Section titled “A plugin has no thumbnail at all”

Run a targeted scan on just that plugin: select it, right-click, and choose Autocapture Thumbnail — see Auto thumbnail scanner.

On the Mac (from 1.2.5), a plugin the Capture Helper cannot draw gets a plain card with its developer, name and format, and a plugin that broke during the scan shows in red with the reason. On Windows, the plugin may be blocklisted from a previous crash. Either way, use manual camera capture instead: open the plugin’s own window in REAPER, hover its card in VFxM, and press C.

A capture is blank or cut off

Section titled “A capture is blank or cut off”

Usually a timing issue — the screenshot was taken before the plugin’s GUI finished rendering. This is more common with GPU-accelerated or OpenGL plugin interfaces.

Wait until the plugin’s window has finished painting, then capture it again; a new capture replaces the old thumbnail, so there is no cost to retrying. There is no capture-delay setting to raise.

Windows: the capture waits, then times out

Section titled “Windows: the capture waits, then times out”

On Windows a manual capture does not grab the screen itself. It hands off to the Windows Snipping Tool: VFxM empties the clipboard, opens Snipping Tool, and then watches the clipboard for the image you snip. The status line reads Waiting for screen capture… while it waits.

  • Draw the snip and the image becomes the thumbnail as soon as it lands on the clipboard.
  • Press Esc in Snipping Tool to cancel; VFxM reports the capture as cancelled.
  • Leave it 60 seconds and VFxM gives up with Screen capture timed out — press Esc in Snipping Tool to cancel. Press Esc to close the overlay, then capture again. A timeout also stops the rest of a batch, so restart the batch afterwards.
  • If Snipping Tool will not open at all, VFxM says so and suggests Win + Shift + S. Take the shot that way and paste it from the clipboard instead.

macOS: nothing captures at all

Section titled “macOS: nothing captures at all”

This is almost always a permissions issue, not a per-plugin one — see macOS permissions and screen recording. From 1.2.5 the first scan asks once for Screen Recording; without it there are no automatic pictures, the cards stay plain, and Capture by hand still works.