Windows 7 pictures thumbnails NOT update after editing the picture...

Question

I edited a photo (some cropping & brightening) with Windows Live Photo Gallery.

after saving the picture I've noticed that the picture thumbnail was NOT updated.

same thing happened when I edited the photo with Faststone.

Answer 1

Hi Cherizli,

Welcome to Microsoft Answers Forums.

a.     May I know the picture file type, for which thumbnail is not updated after editing?

b.     Does the issue occur with all your photos?

Method 1: -

I’d suggest you to perform Disk Cleanup, cleaning up your temporary internet files, thumbnail, cookies and temp files, so as to check the thumbnail view of the photo is updated by cleaning up your temporary data.

1.     Click on Start Orb, type Disk Cleanup in to the Search box and then press Enter.

2.     Check "Thumbnails" and then click OK.

3.     Click "Delete Files" button.

Please see Disk Cleanup for more information.

Method 2: -

If the above method does not help, delete the thumbcache_*.db files in the following folder (you can copy the following location in to the Search box directly)

%LocalAppData%\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer

Method 3: -

If the issue still exists, please see if it occurs in other user accounts.

Hope this information helps you.

Regards,

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Yaaser - Microsoft Support Engineer

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Answer 2

I had the same problem

 >> Editing a photo would not automatically update the thumbnail on save

Found a solution though

 >> Right Click in the Folder that contains the images

 >> Select View

 >> Note the current icon size, and change it to another size (ie: "Medium-Icons" to "Large-Icons", then back to "Medium-Icons")

 >> This causes the icons to be resized and their cache updated

Not ideal, but a fix none the less.

• Windows 7 - 32bit - Ultimate

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IP Aust

Answer 3

I tried changing the icon size, but the old thumbnails returned when the folder was refreshed.

I tried all the other suggestions here and in every other forum on the subject I could find.

None of them worked!

I did find a method, myself, for changing one icon at a time. Not much use if you have a geat many, but OK if you have a thumbnail that you find particularly annoying.

Go to the folder containing the picture file in Windows. Display the picture with Windows Photo Viewer. Rotate the picture then close the window. The thumbnail in the folder is shown rotated. Close the folder.

Open the picture file in Adobe Photoshop Elements (This may work using other photo software, I don't know). Rotate the picture back. Save the picture, and close Adobe Photoshop Elements.

Re-open the folder containing the picture file in Windows. The thumbnail now displays correctly. Even when you refresh the window, the thumbnail does not change back.

This is a pain in the ****. In fact it is my only real complaint about Windows 7,  so PLEASE, Microsoft, reinstate the Refresh Thumbnail option ASAP.

Answer 4

Found a solution though

 >> Right Click in the Folder that contains the images

 >> Select View

 >> Note the current icon size, and change it to another size (ie: "Medium-Icons" to "Large-Icons", then back to "Medium-Icons")

 >> This causes the icons to be resized and their cache updated

Not ideal, but a fix none the less.

Thanks, this works for refreshing the thumbnails for the Large-size icons, but interestingly, the medium-size icons are not being refreshed, and hence not updated.

Answer 5

Kresho123 nailed it: some files have ready-made embedded thumbnails which are simply extracted by the system to create the Small and Medium thumbnails that gets cached to the system-managed shared thumbnail cache. Those files typically are out-of-camera JPEGs. Large and Extra-Large thumbnails are created by reducing the full-size image (or a preview of it, when the underlying format supports these, e.g. raw files) as the embedded thumbnails are typically too small to generate high quality Large/Extra-Large thumbnails.

Dumb software may fail to recreate the embedded thumbnail when saving the file (and simply copy the original embedded thumbnail to the saved file instead), as a result the thumbnail cache, which relies on the embedded thumbnail when present, keeps using what happens to be an out-of-date version of the embedded thumbnail and creates the Small/Medium cached thumbnails from it, so clearing the thumbnail cache has no effect.

When there is no embedded thumbnail, Small/Medium/Large and Extra-Large cached thumbnails are all made from the full (or preview) image and thus reflect any edits made.

This is clearly a bug in the editing applications, which fail to keep the embedded thumbnail in-sync with the full image, or fail to remove the now obsolete embedded thumbnail when saving a file.

Removing the embedded thumbnail from the files does fix the issue as Kresho123 explained, as it force the thumbnail cache to use the real image, but it also slows down the thumbnail creation somewhat as the thumbnail cache needs to extract a larger version of the image, then reduce it to the desired size, instead of just extracting a ready-made thumbnail already downscaled and ready for use.