I was browsing the “My Pictures” folder and noticed that the previews of the various images in the folder were wrong. It wasn’t all of them and it wasn’t a certain file type either, just some of them were wrong. After a bit of poking around I found the cause.

I have recently got a new laptop and when I transferred everything across I just dumped things in a shared drive and copied it across, including certain files such as Desktop.ini and Thumbs.db. The last file was the cause of the problem and the simplest fix is this:

• Open Windows Explorer (or My Computer) and go to “My Pictures”
• Go to “Tools” > “Folder Options…”
• Uncheck “Hide protected operating system files [Recommended]” and click OK
• Delete the file “Thumbs.db”
• Change back the setting for hiding protected files
• Preview the folder again - everything should be back to normal

You might have to do this with every folder that contains images and therefore a Thumbs.db file.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 28th, 2008 at 3:52 pm and is filed under Windows. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.