Forcing Windows 7 to always compute thumbnails for icons that are displayed on a given folder

Question

First, a bit of background: I often find myself opening folders that contain thousands of images. When I open a folder for which thumbnails have not been generated, Windows usually notices the action of opening the folder, and computes the thumbnails for the icons that fall under the current view.

Moreover, I believe Windows prioritizes the computation of thumbnails for those icons that are being displayed within the current scroll window.

However, this behavior is not consistent, and sometimes I open a folder and, no matter how long I wait, Windows does not update or compute the thumbnails for the images in the folder.

So my question is: Is there a way to force Windows 7 to always update or compute the thumbnails for those icons on a given folder as I browse it?

Answer 1

Doesn't look like you can, you'll need to do it "manually", as all the thumbnails are now stored in 1 central location:

%userprofile%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer

Depending on how often you want this to happen, it may be tricky, so have a look guides about deleting the cache. This may get frustrating if you have to reboot to perform the thumbnail cache deletes

How can I delete the thumbnail cache?

which links to

http://ask-leo.com/how_do_i_turn_off_thumbsdb_in_windows_7.html