Unable to Disable Thumbnail Cache

Brink may have a solution for you as I'm in the dark. Post you issues in the tutorial thread I linked too.

Windows is still generating and saving the .db files after disabling thumbnails via the registry AND Group Policy editor.

Any ideas why or how to finally tell Windows enough is enough, and to enforce its own rules?

Hello David,

Since you do not want thumbnail previews, you could just disable thumbnail previews to not have them.

As far as the thumbnail cache, you might see if resetting it may help to no longer generate it since you disabled the thumbnail cache.

Thumbnail Cache - Clear and Reset

Hope this helps, :)
Shawn

You are turning off the wrong thumbnail caching. In group policy where you turned the other thumbnail catching off you want: "Turn off the caching of thumbnails in hidden thumbs.db files"

There are two thumbnail caches in Windows 7, the first one is a central store at "C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer" this handles all thumbnail caching for the whole computer. Now, thumbs.db files are created for network locations, or in Windows 7 libraries and other interfaces seem to go though a network interface fooling the caching routines as if local files were on a network drive. Thus you get thumbs.db when you should not.

Registry key if you don't have group policy:

Code:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer]
"DisableThumbsDBOnNetworkFolders"=dword:00000001

Thank you logicearth. I've updated the .reg files in the tutorial to include that as well now. :)

In GPE both need to be turned off then?

Britton30 said:

In GPE both need to be turned off then?

Hey Gary,

Yep, both need to be set to "Enabled" in GPE like in OPTION TWO below to disable the cache. :)

Thumbnail Cache - Enable or Disable

Cyberwolf, even when you disable Thumbnail caching those files "thumbcache_*.db" are always created. ALWAYS.