Aug 6

Thumbnails in Windows Explorer

Server 2008 R2 Workstation , , , Add Comment (8)

Previews of media files are disabled by default in Windows Server 2008 R2. In this article we will enable it so we get these thumbnails back again!

To do this open Windows Explorer and press the left Alt key on your keyboard. Now click Folder options in the Tools menu and go to the View tab. Uncheck the Always show icons, never thumbnails checkbox and click OK or Apply to start having thumbnails for media files.
Uncheck "Always show icons, never thumbnails" in Folder Options

 

Continue to get the Windows 7 logo boot screen…


8 comments so far...

  • Shahed26 Said on September 28th, 2009 at 11:20 pm:

    Video Thumbnails for “MPG”, “MTS” dont work. Anybody has any workaround? Tried installing klite codec pack as well, but still did not work.

  • kurian Said on March 14th, 2010 at 1:21 am:

    This doesn’t work for video thumbnails.

  • Deepak Vasudevan Said on December 29th, 2010 at 7:58 pm:

    I badly needed the Thumbnail to compare and prepare a spreadsheet of 84 images in my website.

    Your trick of enabling the thumbnails on a 64 bit Windows Server 2008 (R2) worked.

  • Jatin Said on August 17th, 2011 at 6:33 am:

    Thanks man

  • Aaron Said on September 13th, 2011 at 6:06 pm:

    Do you know of any way to make this change via group policy? or via a registry edit?

    Arris: This is surely possible: let Sysinternals Process Monitor capture all events while clicking the OK button after modifying the value of the checkbox. Now look in the Process Monitor output and look for registry writes in the Operation column to find the corresponding key/value in the registry. :)

  • Sathya Said on October 31st, 2011 at 12:36 pm:

    Thank U::

  • David Said on January 25th, 2012 at 12:40 am:

    This worked for video thumbnails for me, as well as thumbnails for media folders.

  • AD Said on June 26th, 2012 at 5:44 pm:

    Thanks a lot!

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