How do I get portrait tumbnails out of the game files - ones like my avatar, but for Sims 4. Do I use S4PE?

If yes, how?
If no, then what?

I have a lot of sim pictures in my Documents > Electronic Arts > Sims 4 > localthumbcache.package. All sorts of sizes. (For the larger ones, it takes a little while for S4PE to show the preview, so don't scroll away too fast)

The screenshot shows what I get when I try do to that. I find localthumbnailcache.package using SimPE and hit "open" but there are no previews, just an error message, when I scroll through the list.



As far as I can tell the only thing that cahnges is the resource name - same error message for every single resource.

With some of the UNKNs I have that too (those that have instances of mostly zero), but not all of them. And there's THUM resources as well, I believe those are from CAS though.

Maybe you have a different version of s4pe? Mine's not brand new -- creation date of the exe is 08/24.

And have you been unzipping s4pe with 7z? There are issues when unpacking it with that Windows built-in thing, some resources aren't unpacking correctly when you do that.

This is likely to be the problem. The auto update for s4pe keeps throwing up an error message for me, but I figured it was no big deal - I could always check the site for new versions. I have got the newest version of s4pe but I'll have a go at it with 7z.

Edit: THAT SOLVED IT!
Thank you so much

Edit 2: I got ahead of myself. Next question - how to export the images? Tried just hitting export but it was making a copy of the files, not the picture..

You need to export as DDS, then convert -- check out any random tutorial about recoloring for details on how to do that. That process is always the same no matter what you do with the pic. See the Tutorials forum/sticky.

Thank you for your help. I've never been in at the ground floor for a game & mods before - I'm always late enough that I can just google whatever I'm struggling with. I usually just learn one or two tricks by rote and repeat them ad infinitum...

Found a tutorial but couldn't figure out how to apply it to this circumstance.
Started following tutorial more closely and accidentally made a pusheen tank top

https://fbcdn-sphotos-h-a.akamaihd....6935fa61d5515a6

Its cool because I've wanted to get into modding for a while but it was not what I was trying to do at ALL.
(Also the swatch icon didn't work and I think I went too subtle with the pink)
Still, it's something I couldn't do yesterday!

My main problem is I still can't figure out how to export as DDS. There just doesn't seem to be an option. There's export as file or as package. Can you show me a screenshot of where you found the option yo export as DDS please?