Solved Folders icons showing/not showing content

[Paultx]

Why is it that sometimes the folders icons show samples of their contents and sometimes not?

Check the two images: the first shows Desktop in Windows Explorer; the second shows the desktop itself.


Any idea on how to make Windows always show the folders contents samples?

TIA.

 

[Brink]

Hello Paul,

You might see if clearing and resetting the thumbnail cache may be able to help.

 

[Paultx]

Yes, it did. As to the desktop itself, I found that the icon with the content appears only if we set the icons bigger than the small size, via context menu or Crtl+scroll wheel.

Thanks again.

 

[Brink]

Great news. You're welcome.

 

[apb]

My problem was I do NOT want content shown on mp4 files on the desktop. The size I need to go to with ctrl-mousewheel is truly ridiculously tiny in order to not display content. And, it is far tinier than on my other win 7 machine. On the other machine, no matter how big I make the icon with crtl-wheel, it does NOT display content. So, there must be some interplay of metrics besides just icon size.

Killing the thumbnail cache had no effect.

Also, when I create an mp4 file, while it is being copied to the desktop, it has the correct icon (in my case, the VLC icon). Once it finishes copying, explorer changes the icon to content.

I have observed that the various ways to control icon size and spacing that seem like they should do the same thing, don't actually do the same thing, so maybe the first thing I need to do is figure out what size icons explorer thinks it is using at the moment. I'm not sure that is necessarily visible in the registry, since sometimes it seems that registry values do not reflect what has been done interactively.

So, any idea how to track this down?

--peter

 

[apb]

found my solution

Ok, never mind. I found the solution.

My desktop was set to not "always show icons never thumbnails." Why, I do not know, since I had already set that for allegedly all folders. So, I was able to fix this by going to explorer > desktop > Tools tab > Folder Options > View tab > check "always show icons never thumbnails."

In general in that view setting I set almost everything to the complement of Windows's default. I suspect that my problem is that when I did so, and clicked "apply to folders" it does not consider desktop to be included in the same type as whatever dir I was in when I did it.

--peter

 

[Brink]

 

[Paultx]

apb, I understood perfectly you don't want to, but in case you want or need Windows to show videos thumbnails of some formats the OS doesn't by default, you can try Icaros.