I will soon move large amounts of photos and videos from my Windows 10 PC to an NAS. To minimize thumbnail load times when accessing those files on the NAS, I want to create thumbs.db files in every folder while the data is still on my PC's HDDs.
In this thread, I found a great tool to automatically generate thumbnail caches recursively:
Automatically generate thumbnails for all subfolders of a directory in Windows 7?
However, for files stored on a local HDD, only the thumbnail caches in %LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer are updated and no thumbs.db file is created in the folder containing the photos and videos.
By default, Windows 10 will create thumbs.db files within folders on network drives and a centralized thumbnail cache in %LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer for files on local drives.
There are group policy and registry options for disabling thumbnail caching altogether, but I have not found a way to force the creation of dedicated thumbs.db files within media folders on local drives. Any ideas on how to achieve this?
A possible workaround would be to use the WinThumbsPreloader tool linked in the other thread on the network drives after I transferred the data from my PC to the NAS. However, I don't know how long this will take due to significantly reduced read speeds for data on the NAS.
Best Answer
You can trick Windows 10 into creating thumbs.db files by sharing your folder with images/video on your local network. Then you connect to it using
\\MY_COMPUTER_NAME\folder_name. By browsing the folders Windows will generate thumbs.db files in the respective folders; this will be faster with WinThumbsPreloader tool that you mention.However, it seems uncertain whether Windows 10 actually makes use of the thumbs.db files that have been generated. From my experiments it seems like it ignores them, rendering this whole process moot.