Viewing thumbnails as images but without .thumbs file

Do you have Hide protected operating system files (Recommended) unchecked as well?



I have Show hidden files, folders, and drives checked, and Hide extensions for known file types unchecked, and I get no .thumbs file on the desktop (nor desktop.ini which will also show if protected system files are showing).

Show hidden files, folders, and drives is NOT the same as Hide protected operating system files (Recommended). I doubt you need to regularly have protected operating system files showing. Those files should not have reason to "access them, to change them, to delete them, to replace them etc."

A Guy

What is the .thumbs file? I've searched my entire hard drive and don't have a single instance of it.

I could be wrong but I thought thumbnails get stored in thumbs.db files.

Take a look at this tutorial:

Thumbnail Cache - Enable or Disable

and this one:

Thumbnail Previews - Enable or Disable

I don't see any thumbnail cache on my system even with hidden files shown.

Well I do see a few small files in this folder only:

%userprofile%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer

There are 6 files in total. All except one are 1kb in size. The other is 4kb.

Folder options are set to show icons never thumbnails in all folders. Folder template discovery is switched off and all folders are set to general template and list view with no preview pane.

If I want a thumbnail cache I create my own as per This Post

I'm not sure if there's any additional settings that I've tweaked in order to prevent any thumbnail cache being created.