Directory Opus currently handles icons the same way explorer does: separately for icons and thumbnails. To be clear, icons are associated with executables with embedded icons, shortcuts, and URL files, while thumbnails are generated from plugins or shell thumbnail handlers.
DOpus icon sizes large (32x32) and small (16x16) icon sizes date back to XP or even pre-XP days, though I understand they are a good size for toolbars. On the 1080p screens that most of us run bare minimum now, these icons are are dwarfed by the labels even with a smallish font, and 2k and 4k screens are common. Since Win7 (maybe vista), the sizes have been medium 48x48 and large 96x96, and it's common for most things to come with a 256x256 icon embedded. So I'm guessing most of us use thumbnail, detail or tiles modes rather than the two icon modes. This comes with its own problems.
Treating all icons as thumbnails would provide two very distinct benefits:
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It would allow scaling up of icons to whatever size the user wants them to be as standard. Currently neither dopus or explorer scale up, but they will scale down. In the past it scaling up has been considered ugly, but DOpus thumbnailing now allows more control over scaling and cropping and filters. If you want to see this in action, extract an .ICO file from an executable and dopus will scale it as a picture; doing this to make a shortcut works, but is surely not practical to do for every file.
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It would allow DOpus to cache icons, which it currently does not do. Windows does, but it's terrible at it. In Windows 10 caching is so prone to corruption (usually missing icons or icons that are suddenly too small) that by default it's wiped every boot and is only 500 KB in size. Win 11 does not seem to have improved matters.
Is this something that is possible or is there a genuine hard technical reason why icons are not treated like thumbnails in dopus?