I'm running the Complete Collection - got fed up with Legacy and managed to track down the one disk I didn't still have from back in the day. I vaguely remember there was a simple way to fix the object images that don't show up correctly in Sim Categorizer (many show up as the base object instead). I have a huge crapton like that, and it makes figuring out how to re-categorize them difficult when you can't see what they are. I think it had to do with opening them in a separate installation of just the base game and no EPs. That isn't possible anymore since the only way to make the game run on today's computers requires MM. Does anyone know another fairly simple way to fix the images? Or maybe there's some other program that works better in that regard? I've heard of SimOrganizer but I don't know whether the object images show up more accurately than in Sim Cat.

Technically speaking, it IS possible on modern computers to load objects into an environment with less EPs--cracked exes are out there for installations that only have lower EPs but just aren't as frequently known about/recommended (I don't remember where the zip of them is, though), and it's also in theory possible to load them into a dev/Edith build (one of which is out there and is version 1.1 of the game (base game with the patch that uses rosebud instead of klapaucius) but also not exactly since it's a dev build) though I don't know if that would always behave the same as the base game would do.

Someone pointed me to cracked exe's for all versions of The Sims, including the base game only. I haven't used these, so I do NOT vouch for them, but you can try them and see if they work for you: Cracked sims.exe for all versions.

Thanks very much to both of you, I'll download that and see if I can get it to work for me. I did have older cracks (WAY older) but I tried to use one for the base game and it wasn't working so mine were probably just too old. Crossing my fingers!

Yeah thumbnails are actually generated by the game as you load it. I don't know why they decided to do this way, and stop storing them, but I believe it was to solve a caching issue they had in earlier versions.