Comments on: Stop/Prevent Windows 7 From Deleting Thumbnail Cache

By: Danman

Danman — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 15:30:59 +0000

OH MY GOD, Allah, Buddha, Yahweh and the Flying Spaghetti Monster – THANK YOU! This has saved my sanity. I’m a graphic designer with my own business and I’m whipping in and out of folders hundreds of times a day. This has almost turned me gray. You’ve saved me.

By: prat

prat — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 14:10:01 +0000

sp1 came and went and not to mention countless stability updates installed already and still no fix… in fact its now worse than ever for me if i don’t apply this workaround.. deleted all my thumbnails sometimes 2 times on the same day itself
makes me wanna dump 7 for ubuntu but it just doesn’t cut it for me sadly.
was thinking of getting a mac but find it hugely overpriced for the hardware they give.
so i’m just stuck…like many others.

By: bmac

bmac — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 21:51:27 +0000

This fix works for about a month. After that, Windows 7 deletes the thumbnail cache, seemingly oblivious to the permission rules!

By: Randy

Randy — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 20:55:03 +0000

You only have to deny permission to the system (not users) for this to work.

By: bmac

bmac — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 19:10:40 +0000

I’ve been applying this solution for some months now. Even though the problem has improved dramatically, it can still happen sometimes (I suspect it happens just after some Windows 7 automatic updates). Considering that I have a PDF library with 6,000 books, when the problem happens it is still deeply annoying. I spend more than 1 hour to generate all my PDF thumbs again. Any thoughts on how to permanently solve this problem?
p.s. I wouldn’t want to disable Win 7 automatic updates

By: Windows7truuks « Windows 7 naar uw smaak

Windows7truuks « Windows 7 naar uw smaak — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 20:18:30 +0000

[...] De reden waarom een map die bijvoorbeeld veel documenten, muziek, foto's en video's bevat zo traag laadt in Windows 7 is dat Win 7 eerst alle thumbnails opnieuw inleest en laadt uit alle mappen en submappen. Ze worden niet bijgehouden. Bij het eindigen van de sessie wordt deze thumbnail-cache opnieuw geleegd. En bij gemengde inhoud gebeurt dit traag. Je kan verhinderen dat de thumbnail cache geleegd wordt doordat elke gebruiker de toestemming ontnomen wordt de thumbnail cache te wissen http://www.addictivetips.com/windows-tips/stopprevent-windows-7-from-deleting-thumbnail-cache/ [...]

By: Steve Martin

Steve Martin — Sun, 03 Oct 2010 04:02:19 +0000

Stop/Prevent Windows 7 From Deleting Thumbnail Cache
This is a great help my question is if I only Deney the system will it stop the automatic deleating of the thumbnail cache
I don’t have a problem with deleting them through Disk cleanup I just hate them deleting themselves.
Please let me know
Steve

By: Turn Off Caching Of Thumbnail Pictures In Windows 7

Turn Off Caching Of Thumbnail Pictures In Windows 7 — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 08:53:01 +0000

[...] = 300; google_ad_height = 250; In one of our previous post we discussed a simple way to stop Windows 7 from deleting thumbnail cache, but what if you want to stop Windows 7 from creating the thumbnail cache in the first place? It [...]

By: jay7

jay7 — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 03:03:17 +0000

I had a go at using Process Monitor, TBH it goes pretty much over my head, but I was able to see entries for the Thumbcachetodelete folder and thumbcache files made by Explorer process. I noticed this registry entry mentioned:

HKCUSOFTWAREMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionThumbnailCache

strangely when I navigate to that entry in regedit, it doesn't exist- could that be indicative of what the problem is? Maybe someone else with more tech knowledge could have a go with Process Monitor as it seems it needs more of a programmer level of knowledge to be able to properly interpret the data?

By: jay7

jay7 — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 02:23:12 +0000

Thanks, I'll take a look.

By: jay7

jay7 — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 23:04:33 +0000

The whole file sorting system in Windows 7 seems poorly thought out- do we really need arrange by, sort by AND group by?

By: Dave

Dave — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 23:03:34 +0000

Hi Jay, try Process Monitor by Sysinternals. You will need to apply some heavy filtering to find the info you need.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals...

By: jay7

jay7 — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 22:58:57 +0000

Little update, the tmp files in the Thumbcachetodelete folder eventually got to 26 and would presumably have kept on growing as the process made repeated (failed) attempts to completely carry out the thumbnail refreshing procedure. I then removed all the special permissions, and as soon as I did that the process moved the db files into the Thumbcachetodeletefolder, and the folder along with the transferred tmp files disappeared in a few minutes (as it usually does without the fix). So I then tried creating new special permissions, adding a deny to “Create folders/append data” as well as the “Delete Subfolders and Files” and “Delete” denial. Unfortunately this led to a worse effect, in that it would not remember any thumbnails after navigating away from a folder, presumably because no data can be appended to the files. So the big question here seems to be what is the process that is carrying out this procedure? As it seems that the process must run immediately after you remove the special permissions is there perhaps any way to capture all the services/procesess that are then active to spot which one is the culprit?

By: Paul Grenfell

Paul Grenfell — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 05:20:10 +0000

I was agreeing with Jay that some obvious Flaws with W7 are being ignore by MS

By: Paul Grenfell

Paul Grenfell — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 05:09:23 +0000

Only works on Desktop, nowhere else, read the Blog..

By: Dave

Dave — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 04:23:27 +0000

How does this relate to the article?

Why can't you right-click the desktop > View > and un-check Auto arrange icons?

Wow

By: Paul Grenfell

Paul Grenfell — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 03:02:24 +0000

RE:"MS seems to be doing their best to ignore the problem:"
As usual..
Same as this dreadful annoyance..
http://social.answers.microsoft.com/Forums/en-U...
"Why has the ability to deactivate Auto Arrange been removed in Windows 7?"

I really thought W7 was going to be so much better than Vista..but I have had to apply so many "Fixes" to W7, i have lost count . I never had to do this with Vista.

By: jay7

jay7 — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 20:30:29 +0000

Thanks for bringing this problem to the attention of the world! Interestingly, the fix does not seem to completely prevent deletion of thumbnails for me, but it does seem to prevent them being deleted all at once as they were previously were. They now seem to be deleted and recreated in rotation i.e. when some new are created others are deleted indicating a limit is being reached? It seems to have caused whatever process is trying to refresh the thumbcache to malfunction; previously when the thumbcachetodelete folder was created, it stored duplicates of the thumbcache.db files as .tmp files, now I have 20 of these and counting.

MS seems to be doing their best to ignore the problem:

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-U...

By: Speed Up Windows 7 Folder Loading Time | LenycoM IT Portal

Speed Up Windows 7 Folder Loading Time | LenycoM IT Portal — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 09:29:01 +0000

[...] we know that it is a headache, this is why we have posted a fix to this problem here. You can always disable Windows 7 from deleting the cache, thus speeding up [...]

By: Paul Grenfell

Paul Grenfell — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 03:21:00 +0000

Brillant Fix. Has sped up my computer dramatically.

Oddly , Windows 7 deletes the Thumbnail Cache and rebuilds it from scratch every time a user changes the content of that folder. Why did they do this?
I am just bemused that W7 would have a feature that actually SLOWS things down quite a bit.. I really miss Vista at times.. W7 is good, but it has some odd misgivings.

By: Piku

Piku — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 18:39:40 +0000

Use PDF-Xchange viewer, it makes thumbnails work in Windows 7 64

By: Dave

Dave — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 14:50:50 +0000

I suppose this is a good tip for folders that you do not delete, Pictures, Videos, etc. However, I was having the exact opposite problem where thumbs.db was constantly being created in my downloads folder and I wasn't able to delete and cleanup folders until sometime later or after I closed explorer and went back in. I had to modify my Local Policy to enable "Turn off caching of thumbnail pictures". Now my HDD and CPU are fast enough for this not to bother me. If you have a slower system it would take much longer for the thumbnails to be created every time you open the folder and this wouldn't be a desirable setting.

gpedit.msc > User Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Windows Explorer > Turn off caching of thumbnail pictures

"This settings controls whether the thumbnail views are cached.

If you enable this setting, thumbnail views are not cached.

If you disable or do not configure this setting, thumbnail views are cached.

Note: For shared corporate workstations or computers where security is a top concern, you should enable this setting to turn off the thumbnail view cache, because the thumbnail cache can be read by everyone."

By: DarkCAMV

DarkCAMV — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 09:38:19 +0000

Interesting… it'll be very useful for me… I have to create with Acrobat (32 bits) the thumbnails for pdf files (as i'm using a 64 bits OS)… but after some time windows deletes them ¬¬

By: mas

mas — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 02:09:41 +0000

Great post. Love it.

By: Speed Up Windows 7 Folder Loading Time

Speed Up Windows 7 Folder Loading Time — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 14:30:19 +0000

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