Preview Image in Thread Display

[chooah]

Rather than try to explain I'll use images:

Before

After


Each thread will contain an image, is there a way I can either parse the contents of an [img] tag OR make use of an attached image to form a preview picture which can be displayed outside of the topic itself.

I'm thinking that if I can process the result of: $thread[preview] to limit itself to what is inside the [img] tags within the post (so it ONLY extracts a valid image URL) I could then create a new column in the thread list, with an icon, which when clicked pops up a new window with the contents of the $thread[preview] parsed image url.

Failing this, I could get it to read the file attachment instead (to save the issues of string/tag selection and parsing).

Anybody got any pointers as to how I could go about this? Or maybe a mod already exists?

Thanks very much for reading, regards,
chu