Purpose
Windows stores thumbnails of graphics files, and certain document and movie files, in the Thumbnail Cache file, including the following formats: JPEG, BMP, GIF, PNG, TIFF, AVI, PDF, PPTX, DOCX, HTML and many others. Its purpose is to prevent intensive disk I/O, CPU processing, and load times when a folder that contains a large number of files is set to display each file as a thumbnail. This effect is more clearly seen when accessing a DVD containing thousands of photos without the thumbs.db file and setting the view to show thumbnails next to the filenames. Thumbnail caching was introduced in Windows 2000; wherein the thumbnails were stored in the image file's Alternate Data Stream if the operating system was installed on a drive with the NTFS file system. A separate Thumbs.db file was created if Windows 2000 was installed on a FAT32 volume. Windows Me also created Thumbs.db files. Beginning with Windows XP, thumbnail caching and thus, creation of Thumbs.db can optionally be turned off from Windows Explorer View Menu, Folder Options and checking "Do not cache thumbnails" on the View tab. Under Windows 2000, Windows Me and Windows XP, a context menu command to force refresh the thumbnail is available by right clicking the image in Thumbnail view of Windows Explorer.
Read more about this topic: Windows Thumbnail Cache
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