by MGD King
Thursday, March 25, 2010 9:53 PM
If you’re like me you get annoyed at those little thumbs.db files that Windows has been leaving around every time you use Windows Explorer to view a folder. It really became frustrating when I was working on a project that parsed the contents of a directory to an XML file (more on that project later I hope!) and I kept seeing thumbs.db in my list! So I thought “there’s got to be a way to get rid of these things” and with a little bit of Googling I was able to use a couple of techniques to make it all go away.
First, open Folder Options and click on the “View” tab. Find “Display file icon on thumbnails” in Advanced Settings and uncheck it like the photo on the left.
Make sure you also uncheck “Hide protected operating system files (Recommended)” for this next step. Now search your drive for thumbs.db. After all of the results are found, press CTRL+A to select them all and then press the DELETE key. You may want to do this to all of your network drives and folders if you have any as well because they’re everywhere!
These thumbs.db files are like ants, don’t do much, and annoying as hell to get rid of but hopefully with this tip you’ll get rid of them and they’ll never come back, that is unless you have someone else who logs on to your computer and/or network and doesn’t know this.
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