TEC File Extension

What is the .TEC file type?

The .tec extension is primarily used in relation to Android image thumbnail files. A very popular operating system for mobile devices (smart phones, tablets), Android creates preview thumbnail files for all images processed or accessed by the OS. In particular, TEC thumbnails are generated on such popular Android-based devices as Samsung Galaxy, Sony Xperia, HTC, etc.

A .tec file is a preview image (thumbnail), a downscaled copy of the original image. Image thumbnails (.tec) are normally created by the Android system for caching purposes, in order to speed up preview and file management operations in the image gallery. TEC files are usually located in the "sdcard/DCIM/Camera/Cache" directory and tend to remain there even after the original images are deleted, which may be considered a security/privacy issue. TEC thumbnails are perfectly safe to delete.

TEC thumbnail files use the JPEG image format and can be easily converted into .jpg image files. There are tools that can automatically perform such conversion (.tec files into .jpg images).

With reference to TECKit (Text Encoding Conversion toolkit), a set of text-processing and codepage-mapping tools by SIL International (Summer Insitute of Linguistics), the .tec extension goes together with the TECKit Mapping File (.tec) file type/format. A .tec file is a compiled version of a TECKit .map file, generated with the TECkit Mapping Editor. Such .map and .tec files are used to create legacy-to-Unicode encoding mappings for older software.

Apart from the above, the .tec extension also associates with the ASCII Tecplot Data (TEC) file type/format. Tecplot, an advanced tool for visualizing various engineering and modeling data by Tecplot, Inc., uses the text-based TEC format mainly for compatibility and data-exchange capability. A .tec file is a textual representation of objects to be plotted. For much faster processing and plotting, Tecplot automatically pre-converts all data inside .tec files into the binary format.

Software to open or convert TEC files

Microsoft Office Picture Manager

 

Windows Live Photo Gallery

 

VLC media player by VideoLAN

 

TEControl Midi Breath Controller

 

Picasa by Google, Inc.

 

Free File Viewer Pro

Download