TechTips - Thumbnails Not Showing Properly in Vista

I have found that often times when I am navigating through my folders some of my pictures will show up as a thumbnail but when I click on the thumbnail to open the file, a totally different picture opens than the one I thought I was opening. I found out that this is due to the Thumbnail Cache being over full or corrupted, it can cause problems with displaying the proper thumbnail.

Luckily this is a fairly simple problem to fix in Vista. A couple simple steps and you will have your thumbnails displaying properly in no time.

So you will want to open up Disk Cleanup. To do this you will go to Start, All Programs, Accessories, System Tools, and then click on the Disk Cleanup Icon. Another way to find this is to open the Start button and in the Search area type Cleanmgr and press enter. Either way you get to the same end result which is Disk Cleanup opens.

Now you will be prompted for which files you want to clean up on the computer. Since the fix isn't a major on I choose Files from all users on this computer, this way everyone will be getting the proper thumbnails when they view their files.

Next you will select the drive you want to clean up, I choose the C: drive since this is where all of my files reside (most of your probably do too, and if you only have one drive you will not see this window at all). Also if you choose Files from all users on this computer then you will need to click Continue when the UAC prompt comes up.

Then when the Disk Cleanup options come up you will want to check the box next to Thumbnails, if there are any other options checked make sure you uncheck them. Now you can click OK and when prompted if you are sure you want to permanently delete the files click the Delete Files button.

Disk Cleanup will clear your thumbnail cache and then close. Now you can go back into the folders where your thumbnails were displaying incorrectly and Windows will rebuild the cache and should be displaying the proper thumbnails. You can test a few of the files that weren't working to verify that they are now displaying properly. Hope this guide worked well for you!