Take the 2-minute tour ×

Is there some way to get explorer to generate thumbnails without actually having to navigate and scroll through every folder?

All I could get was a command prompt script that would load an explorer window for all subfolders, however only images that were visible would have thumbnails created.

share|improve this question
I was sorting my photos and struggling with same thing, but suddenly i realized that the explorer is far from being the right tool to do it. Now i do this in Picasa and it's a great tool. If you're up to the same thing, i suggest you to try it too. –  iTake Feb 8 '12 at 21:11

3 Answers 3

Go to the top level folder and in the search box (top right), search for *.jpg or whatever your image file type is. Change the view to "thumbnails" and shrink it down as small as it'll go. You may need to page down a few times to get them all to generate.

That's the only method I'm aware of.

share|improve this answer

There is a setting in the personalize section in control panel that makes all files show thumbnails of all folders but this drastically increses time to go into folders with many items.

share|improve this answer

No. Thumbnails are generated on-demand by explorer. The only way to get explorer to generate the thumbnails is to "demand" them by having the image visible in the window in one of the thumbnail modes.

share|improve this answer

Your Answer


