Windows 7: Thumbnail Cache - Enable or Disable

You have missed the point that when browsing a network share with write permission, for some reason Windows 7 does not store the thumbs.db in Appdata. Instead it creates a hidden thumbs.db inside the folder containing the files like Windows XP used to...

Part 1 and Part 2 in your guide do different things



Part 1: Disables all local thumbnail caching, and I'm not really sure if it affects remote network shares.

Part 2: disables thumbnail caching on remote shares only.

Hello Ten,

This tutorial is meant for use on a person's single local computer, and not over a remote network.

Thank you for the additional information though.

Hello there. If possible for someone with the Local Group Policy Editor to verify, which of the entries at the top does disabling cache for all users/computer actually create? Thanks!

Hello o770, and welcome to Seven Forums.

Group Policy adds this entry below into the registry when enabled. The REG files available for download are the same for this, but they also include the other options to do this in them as well to be extra thorough to make sure they work no matter what method was used.

I tried disabling Windows 7 thumb caching, both using GPE and Regedit, and subsequently used Linux to remove the thumb folders completely, but a Windows 7 reboot would immediately recreate the folders, and viewing images would immediately repopulate them with thumbs.
The only way I could prevent Windows 7 recreating them was to remove system privileges from the folders and make them read only for my own userID.
That finally created a situation in which no thumbnail cache appears to exist, and a "disk cleanup" on the Windows 7 partition finds no thumbnails to remove, but in truth, there must be another cache somewhere.
Proof of this is simple to demonstrate on my PC, where I can view thumbs which were created when I scanned colour negatives. These scans were reversed, edited, cropped and saved, so in theory, viewing thumbs of these images, should dynamically recreate a thumb of a positive cropped image, but in fact a negative uncropped thumb will appear for an image which hasn't existed for several years in that form.
In the years since these ghost thumbs were created, the cache has been "cleaned" out multiple times, removed, recreated, removed again, disabled and apparently no longer exists, and yet there they still are.
All thumbs.db files from XP and Vista versions of the same image folder based caches were also scrubbed from the system, and yet they're still being conjured up from somewhere !
There's a longer, detailed discussion in another forum, with attached proof of my ghost thumbs existing despite total absence of any official cache, but I haven't linked it, not wishing to infringe site etiquette as a new poster.
I'm a long-time mod in the other place, and can link it if required.

Hello Terry, and welcome to Seven Forums.

Sorry, if I may have misunderstood you, but.....

Disabling the thumbnail cache doesn't stop thumbnails from being created or loaded. It only make Windows load the thumbnails in memory on the fly each time instead of from the preloaded cache.

Could you post a screenshot showing this?

Hi Shawn, thanks for the reply.
All the images demonstrating this can be found here in the thread I mentioned.
The Windows 7 cache(s), as I said no longer exist. The .user\myname\appdata\....\explorer folder now contains just a couple of startuplog.etl files and absolutely no .db files. The picture folders themselves contain no .db files.
Just to emphasize the point, I'll attach one specific example, where you can see a negative has been scanned upside down, turned 180 degrees, colour reversed, cropped and saved.
Despite the fact that the thumbnail cache has been subjected to "disk cleanup", deleted with Ubuntu, prevented from being recreated, and to all intents and purposes just doesn't exist anymore, the thumbnail still remains as originally created.

Where is it picking it up from ?

Terry,

I must admit that I don't know where it may be pulling the thumbnail image from since you have the thumbnail cache disabled, and still after refreshing the window or restarting the computer.

I suppose it wouldn't hurt to rebuild the icon cache as well to test, but I wouldn't think it would come from there though.

Hi Terry,

I created an account just to reply to your quandry, because I'm almost certain that I know whats going on here. Almost all (but not 100%) of the popular image formats allow for embedded metadata and embedded thumbnails. The concept is that for larger files thumbnail generation could be time consuming, so by embedded a thumbnail in the image the image can be quickly previewed etc.
The embedded thumbnail needs to be regenerated when modifying an image with an embedded thumbnail, for example if you edit a jpeg file with a embedded thumbnail (btw: JPEG File Interchange Format - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia and they discuss this a bit), and you make visual changes to it, the thumbnail should be updated by your editing software when you save the file.

Long story shorter - Not all photo editing software, especially command line tools and automated cropping and rotating scripts update embedded thumbnails, and even in photoshop when you edit a photo you can tell photoshop to not update the embedded thumbnail, in which case you will get what you see in your example.

An image with an older version thumbnail that does not visually agree with the full image content of the file.