How to increase Windows Explorer default thumbnail size for pictures

Posted on November 3, 2007 at 8:33 am

Here’s something about Windows XP that really annoys me: why is it that the size for thumbnails cannot be increased or decreased? If you’re going to have thumbnails in the first place, is it that hard to put in a little slider bar whereby you can increase or decrease the size? I hate going through a folder in Explorer and not being able to clearly see what a picture is about.

By default, thumbnails in Windows XP look like this:

That size is simply not large enough for me! Luckily, there’s an easy way to modify these settings so that the thumbnails can be any size you want and the best part is that you don’t have to modify the registry or anything like that.

Previously, I had written about a cool little utility that you can get for free from Microsoft called Tweak UI that lets you modify and “tweak” a bunch of Windows XP settings. Using this program, we can quickly and easily change the default 96 pixels size of thumbnails to something more visible.

Once you install the program, go to the Start Menu and click on All Programs – Powertoys for Windows XP – Tweak UI. After you have opened the program, click on Explorer from the left hand menu and then click on Thumbnails.

Change the default size from 96 to something higher. In my case, I chose 256. Also, make sure to keep the Image Quality closer to high so that the thumbnails look nice. Of course, it will take more resources when browsing pictures, but if you have a fairly new computer, it should not be a problem.

Now when you browse through your photos in My Pictures or anywhere where you have thumbnails turned on, you should see something like this:

Now that is much better! I can actually see what’s going on in a picture! Cheers!

[tags]thumbnails, windows thumbnails, explorer thumbnail size, change thumbnail size[/tags]

» Filed Under Windows XP

Comments

9 Responses to “How to increase Windows Explorer default thumbnail size for pictures”

jessy said on : March 12th, 2008 at 7:35 am

hi I am trying to increase the size of images on my website, any ideas please, all suggestions are welcome

Jenz Iggo said on : June 2nd, 2008 at 8:53 pm

Thanks dude, this has worked on my machine. And it doenst hang like Irfanview Thumbs did!

kevin said on : July 13th, 2008 at 4:51 pm

thanks for the quick fix!

ken smith said on : November 22nd, 2008 at 3:36 pm

his is not a “fix” but is a workaround using a third party program. I personally think tweakUI is GUI newbie crap. if you want to change the size of thumbnails in explorer just make an adjustment to the registry. Regedit is your friend.

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer]
“ThumbnailSize”

the range is from 96 to 256

there are hundreds of alterations that you can make via the registry. TweakUI is just a GUI frontend that allows you to alter 10 or so things in the registry.

learn how to alter the registry yourself and you can completely alter windows without needing third party crap like TweakUI and the many other third party clutter that bogs your system down.

just my .02

Peter said on : January 3rd, 2009 at 4:22 pm

Thanks for this tip! I actually HAD TweakUI already and had forgotten I had it. BTW, I use Snaplogger (free version) in an attempt to keep track of how I waste time. While it’s fine to view the Snaplogger screen shots with a graphics viewer, I wanted to view them within Explorer. I was limited, though, by the small thumbnail dimensions. By increasing the thumbnail size as you suggested, and using another freeware app (QTTabBar), I can view the screen shots (now large enough to decipher) from Snaplogger simply by mousing over the file name in Win Explorer. So, thanks for reminding about this helpful “third-party crap”! (IMHO. . .Editing the registry directly is great for folks who are expert enough to know what they’re doing and how to fix what they’ve done wrong. For others, whose knowledge is not quite as broad, it can be a disaster that turns their computer – at least temporarily – into a doorstop.)

Ryan Rey A Valdehueza said on : August 4th, 2009 at 11:20 pm

I located[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer]
but I can not locate “ThumbnailSize”.

First Party Crap said on : November 1st, 2009 at 10:42 am

See, http://teamtutorials.com/windo.....windows-xp for a complete set of instructions for editing the registry directly for this purpose, including creating the entry for “ThumbnailSize”.

Arvind said on : December 6th, 2009 at 5:24 am

I tried TweakUI and changed thumbnail size to 256 but it still shows small thumbnails. It looks that the UI takes the 256 size and shows 2 images per row but images still 96x. Any Ideas?

Larry said on : January 5th, 2010 at 1:32 pm

Comment #4 by Ken Smith is correct, but the DWORD Value ThumbnailSize may not exist on your system, so you will have to create it. The Windows XP default value is 96 decimal. I have mine set to 144 decimal.

Also, I could not get the change to work until I deleted the Thumbs.db file from my folder. This file is a cache of thumbnails, and is pretty much useless IMHO.

I would advise going to

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced

and modifying DisableThumbnailCache to the value 1

This will prevent the creation of any new Thumbs.db files.

You might also want to do a global delete of all Thumbs.db files, which will free up significant disc space.