A vein imaging apparatus includes a lens array including a plurality of photo-receiving lenses arranged in an array, a plurality of near-infrared illumination sources placed along opposed ends of the lens array to illuminate a part of a living body with near-infrared light, an image pickup device to create a picked-up image of a vein based on the near-infrared light scattered inside the living body, transmitted through the vein and gathered by the lens array, where a plurality of photoreceptors are allocated to one photo-receiving lens, and a thumbnail image creation unit to acquire information about the near-infrared light received by one photoreceptor among the plurality of photoreceptors allocated to one photo-receiving lens as pixel information corresponding to one photo-receiving lens, acquire the pixel information for all the photo-receiving lenses included in the lens array and create a thumbnail image based on the acquired pixel information.
