Surely more than once you have entered a Windows folder and seen a file called thumbs.db . Well, we are going to tell you what it is and what it is for , depending on the version you have of Microsoft’s operating system.
This thumbs.db file is like a database of thumbnail images in a folder. Windows used it as a cache memory to speed up the view of the thumbnails so as not to have to load them from scratch every time we access said folder.
The problem comes when, on many occasions, we could not delete or move that folder because thumbs.db was (always hidden), because it is a file that cannot be deleted .
How to reset Windows 10 forgotten password
This happened until Windows 10 appeared , since this version of the operating system stopped using these types of files , since now it stores all the information of the captures in the same location.
Disable thumbs.db in Windows 7 and 8
If having this thumbs.db file is annoying, now we are going to tell you how you can deactivate it.
- We must press the Windows key .
- And in the space to write (bottom left of the screen) we put ” Folder options “.
- Next, we go to the ” View ” tab .
- And finally we mark the option ” Always show icons, never seen in thumbnails “.
With this we deactivate future thumbs.db files, but the previous ones still exist and, therefore, we are going to tell you how to eliminate them.
- We open the Windows ” File Explorer “.
- Click with the left button of the mouse, choosing ” Properties “, on the unit where we have Windows installed.
- Now in the ” General ” tab (the one that comes out by default) we must click on the button that says ” Free up space “.
- Once inside we will have to mark the option ” Thumbnails ” and click on ” OK “.
In this way we erase all the thumbnails that we have on our computer, in the Windows 7 and 8 operating systems.
How to copy files larger than 4 GB to a pendrive
Disable thumbnail cache in Windows 10
As we have already mentioned, in Windows 10 there are no longer thumbs.bd files.
Microsoft opted for a single location for the thumbnails , which makes it easier to delete them all at once, as we will explain below.
- The first thing is to make the hidden files stop being hidden and for this we open the Windows ” File Explorer “.
- Then click on the ” View ” tab .
- Next, we open the drop-down in the upper right, ” Show or hide .”
- Once there we select ” Hidden elements “.
- Now we have the files and folders hidden from view, so it is time to go to the location where the thumbnails are saved, what is the following:
C: \ Users \ Username \ AppData \ Local \ Microsoft \ Windows \ Explorer
Obviously as long as the drive where Windows 10 is installed is C: and replacing “Username” with the name that each one has in your Windows.
- Once we are inside this folder, we just have to delete the files that start with thumbcache .
This will mean that we no longer have the thumbnails of our folders and that they will be automatically generated again, if we do not have it configured so that this does not happen.
If you don’t want more thumbnails to be generated , you just have to follow exactly the same steps as for Windows 7 and 8, and check the option ” Always show icons, never thumbnails ” (as we saw above), since this part does not It has varied in Windows 10.
Now every time you see a thumbs.db file you will already know what it is , what Windows uses it for and how to remove it in any of the versions of Microsoft’s operating system.
