Clearing the Windows Vista thumbnails cache

Posted on July 23, 2008 at 5:18 am

A very simple tip this one, but I have to admit I was not aware of it myself until today. I found I needed to clear all of the thumbnail images that are shown in the folder views within vista windows. I had installed a new codec pack, and wanted all of the thumbnails in my video library to be consistent in size and quality, so I needed to get rid of the old thumbnails.

Before those of you who already know how to do this start shouting at me saying it’s easy, I would like to defend myself by saying I have never had a need to reset my thumbnails before, and was expecting a much more complicated procedure. Actually, the reason I am posting such a simple tip, is that I am sure there are other folks out there like me, who had no idea where this particular feature of Windows Vista is tucked away hiding.

I scratched my head for a while, I could not remember seeing any system tools to rebuild icons or anything similar in control panel. I absolutely refused to Google up an answer, as I figured I should be able to work this out for myself. I am sorry to say it took me far too long to realise how to do this. In the end it was very simple.

thumbnails

Yes, as you can see, I finally found the option I was looking for when I fired up the disc cleanup utility. Ok, in my defense I would like to point out that both Windows XP and Windows 98 had a separate tool for rebuilding icons, so I was not expecting to just delete the thumbnails, I thought I would have to force some kind of system wide reset.

But there we have it, a very simple way to refresh your thumbnail images, for all types of files and folders, sitting right under your nose! Actually, I had no idea that the disc cleanup utility that is provided as part of the operating system was so well featured, as well as allowing the remove of restore points, usually I used TuneUp Utilities for this little function, now I now how to do it with a native Vista feature.

I think I am going to spend some time exploring every system utility that comes as part of a standard Windows Vista install, and see what other gems I am missing, if I find many interesting things, I will combine them into a post for this site.

Technorati Tags: ,

» Filed Under Windows Vista

Related Posts

Comments

5 Responses to “Clearing the Windows Vista thumbnails cache”

  1. Supermind said on : January 11th, 2009 at 1:30 am

    I recently had an issue with thumbnails not displaying in Vista. I googled solutions and found many tech forums discussing this same issue. All suggestions made, I had already tried other than screwing with registry). Selecting thumbnails in disk cleanup as listed above DID restore all thumbnail capability. Spread the news!


  2. Charles said on : June 15th, 2009 at 5:56 pm

    Where did you go to get that “Disk Cleanup for (C:)” to show up. I have windows vista and i absolutely can not find it.


  3. Steve said on : November 26th, 2009 at 1:02 pm

    Click Start, then type Disk Cleanup in the search box.


  4. realm174 said on : November 29th, 2009 at 9:37 am

    Charles: open “My Computer”, right click on the drive you want to clean, select properties. Disk Cleanup is right there, next to the pie chart.


  5. Alan said on : September 12th, 2011 at 12:14 am

    I got to the dialog box for Disk Cleanup, but there was no option to delete thumbnail files. Perhaps because it is on an external hard drive?

    I have a hard believing that Microsoft messed this up so badly, and haven’t fixed it after several years.


Please post your comments/suggestions!