imagespreviewthumbnailswindows 7windows-explorer
Image files used to show as thumbnails in the explorer window, and a larger preview could be seen in the preview pane (alt+p).
Now for some unknown reason, I just see a default image icon in both the explorer view and the preview pane. I have to double click an image to view it. Any ideas on what setting changed that removed the thumbnails and previews?
Checking Always show icons, never thumbnails (in the folder options menu you see in the asker's screenshot), applying, unchecking and applying again, solved the problem for me.
Edit 9-12-2014: Additionally, if you go to Advanced system settings and enter the Performance settings tab, ensure that Save taskbar thumbnail previews and Show thumbnails instead of icons are selected in the available check boxes. This affects all folders globally, rather than doing it for each folder.
In order to get your thumbnails working again, you have to uninstall Java 8. It is funny, but true. For me, only the uninstalling of Java 8 helped; images were shown instantly afterwards. I tried a lot of different things before, given things by several forum discussions. After fixing the issue, you can install Java again, of course.
Best Answer
Just wondering if "Always show icons, never thumbnails." is unchecked.
Also, I had some thumbs.db files get corrupted (for network drives) and on local drives Windows 7 stores all the thumbs in one central db at The cache is stored at
%userprofile%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Exploreras a number of files with the label thumbcache_xxx.db. I normally use something like CCleaner to clean the cache files out.If that doesn't work, I've had programs hijack the file association and that killed the Windows thumb generation. That is a little more complex, and I had a hard time solving that.
Hope this helps.