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It's a small but annoying glitch I'm experiencing. A recent convert from Win so there may be some Finder preference I'm not aware of?

Issue:

  1. I plug my portable drive (500GB formatted as FAT32).
  2. Browse to a movie folder in Finder - List mode. Finder slowly caches all the video thumbnails (well, except for ogg but that's normal :-)
  3. I disconnect my portable drive.
  4. Reconnect the drive and browse to the same folder.
  5. All thumbnails are gone, Finder goes about recreating them.

Any ideas on how to solve this issue?

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  • lists in this markdown need to be separated from the preceeding paragraph by a blank line. ftfy. :) Jun 11, 2010 at 19:31
  • Ah, I see! Thanks for correcting that & the explanation, the first and last time I make this error :-)
    – Dav
    Jun 13, 2010 at 17:28

2 Answers 2

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Thumbnails are typically stored in an HFS+ resource fork and are "invisible" to the end-user. However, since FAT32 doesn't have forks (and by OS X not wanting to be like Windows and make a Thumbs.db file in every single folder), it has to regenerate the thumbnails every time you plug the hard drive in.

Simple explanation: OS X can't store the thumbnails in the resource fork so it opts not to save them on disk at all.

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  • If there is such a thing as a perfect answer, the above would be a member of the club. Thanks for answering, a detailed explanation and sharing your knowledge!
    – Dav
    Jun 13, 2010 at 17:31
  • @Dav No worries! Glad I could help :)
    – squircle
    Jun 13, 2010 at 18:31
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The behavior you want is only supported on Mac OS Extended volumes, not FAT32. (Also, it's slow to regenerate them because macOS is generally slow when accessing FAT32 volumes.)

The fix is to format that drive as Mac OS Extended. I don't know any way of converting it "in place," but you can copy the files on that FAT32 drive to some backup location, reformat the drive, then restore the files.

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  • 1
    Thanks for digging this question from the graveyard somehow and sharing a good first answer. Perhaps not as complete as the accepted one but merits a point all the same.
    – Dav
    Apr 9, 2017 at 20:19

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