Fix image previews and thumbnails in explorer on Windows 7?

Question

Image files used to show as thumbnails in the explorer window, and a larger preview could be seen in the preview pane (alt+p).

Now for some unknown reason, I just see a default image icon in both the explorer view and the preview pane. I have to double click an image to view it. Any ideas on what setting changed that removed the thumbnails and previews?

Answer 1

Just wondering if "Always show icons, never thumbnails." is unchecked.

Also, I had some thumbs.db files get corrupted (for network drives) and on local drives Windows 7 stores all the thumbs in one central db at The cache is stored at %userprofile%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer as a number of files with the label thumbcache_xxx.db. I normally use something like CCleaner to clean the cache files out.

If that doesn't work, I've had programs hijack the file association and that killed the Windows thumb generation. That is a little more complex, and I had a hard time solving that.

Hope this helps.