Windows 7 thumbnail cache

On newer versions of windows, these thumbnails are stored in a central database. Old or new, this may take up large amounts of space on your hard drive or the thumbnails may eventually be broken, so sometimes it needs to be cleared. Type "disk cleanup" into Start. Click Disk Cleanup at the top of Start. Select the Windows hard drive if prompted. Scroll down and check the "Thumbnails" box. Click OK 6. Click Delete Files when prompted.

Did this summary help you? Yes No. Log in Social login does not work in incognito and private browsers. Please log in with your username or email to continue. No account yet? Create an account. Edit this Article. We use cookies to make wikiHow great. By using our site, you agree to our cookie policy.

Cookie Settings. Learn why people trust wikiHow. Download Article Explore this Article methods. Tips and Warnings.

Related Articles. Article Summary. Method 1. Open Disk Cleanup. Select the current hard drive that Windows is installed on, if prompted. Wait for Disk Cleanup to analyze your computer. Within these results there will be an entry called Thumbnails. Put a check next to it and press OK. Disk Cleanup will then remove the entries in the thumbcache databases. You will need administrator access to do this. Thumbnail creation is a system feature and you'll need to use the Local Group Policy Editor to make changes to it.

Open the Start Menu and type the following in the search box: gpedit. You can also type this in the Run command box if you have that option available in the Start Menu. When this program is run, there will be a tree list on the left side of the window. Once selected, you'll see a list of settings on the right side of the window. Most of these settings will probably have a state of Not configured.

This is the default state. There are 4 settings that you'll need to consider when disabling thumbnails. This setting will allow you to prevent Windows from saving thumbnails in the thumbcache databases. In other words, the thumbnails will never be saved to the hard drive. To prevent Windows from saving thumbnails, right click on this setting and select Edit.

In the next window that displays, select Enable and press OK. If this is the only setting you have set, then thumbnails will still be generated and visible, but they simply won't be saved. Sorry this didn't help. Thanks for your feedback. Additionally, I saw another key mentioned as a Windows 7 solution, which I suspect is really a legacy solution:.

EDIT: I said the change hadn't worked for two reasons: 1 explorer kept re-creating the suite of. It appears, however, that even though it's still accessing the. I suspect that it's not writing the actual images, but is still recording something about the thumbnails, whether it's just an index of filenames or whatever. Instead of using the local thumbnail cache, thumbs. This behavior can be changed in the Group Policy.

You can think of them as caches that are designed to speed up the display of folders when you use Windows Explorer. Without the thumbnail cache, Windows would have to process the images in the folder on load every time the folder is opened, which can slow down the display depending on the overall performance of the system and the number of image files in the folder.

Windows does not only store image formats in the database files though. While one of the main purposes is to process jpeg, png, bmp, tiff and gif image files, the cache is also used for document formats such as docx, pptx, pdf and html, and video formats such as avi.

The effect that a thumbs. You will notice that the loading is faster when the thumbnail cache is enabled. This becomes especially apparent on slow storage devices such as image DVDs or slow hard drives. There are a couple of reasons why you may want to turn off the caching.

First, there have been issues in the past where thumbs. Depending on how the computer is used, it may also have privacy implications. A cached thumbnail of an image that you have deleted may still be stored in the cache. If you are the sole user of the PC, it may not be an issue. If there are other users, or even third-parties who may gain access to the computer, you may want to delete those caches regularly to avoid this from happening.

It is furthermore possible to link thumbnails with their original files using various methods. Turning off the caching may however affect the folder loading speed. As mentioned earlier, this can be especially noticeable when you open folders with lots of file types that are usually cached to speed up the loading time.

From Windows XP onward, Microsoft implemented an option to disable the creation of thumbs. If your operating system supports the Group Policy Editor, you can use it to disable thumbnail caching. To load the editor, do the following:. If you do not have access to the Group Policy Editor on your system, you can disable the generation of thumbnail caches on Windows using the Registry instead.

Existing files are not removed automatically when you disable the creation of thumbnail cache files in Windows. For that, you can either use specialized viewer and cleaner applications, or general purpose programs instead. One of the easier ways is to use Windows Search to find all thumbs. Once you have found them all, use Ctrl-A to select them and hit the delete button to remove them all from your system.

Thumbnail Database Cleaner has been designed specifically to find and remove thumbs.