Explorer not displaying PDF thumbnails, but will display JPEGs

Hey Guys, this is an odd one.

I have a new Win10 machine which completely refuses to display thumbnails for PDF file types.

I have checked the view settings in explorer, and also the visual effects settings and it looks correct.

I have tried using Adobe Reader DC (which required a preferences setting to be changed to generate thumbnails) and also Foxit Reader (which doesn't) with no luck. Currently I have Foxit Reader installed.

PDF`s are currently visible in a preview pane, but PDF thumbnails simply wont show up! JPG thumbnails, however, generate just fine.

I did have this issue a while ago on an old machine, but the issue "went away" - I didn't take any deliberate actions to fix, so I`m at a loss to know whats going on here.

Any replies greatly appreciated.

dalchina said:

Hi, does this help?
A quick and easy fix for pdf thumbnail problem ... |Adobe Community

Presumably this is the option you're referring to:
Enable thumbnail preview of PDFs in Windows Explorer

Yes, that's the option I'm referring to.

That adobe post is 4 years old so not too sure its pertinent now. Adobe have apparently fixed their lack of support for thumbnails in their PDF reader based on what ive read, but to be honest that's all pretty academic for me- reason being that I have 3 other machines using foxit on win10 to generate pdf thumbnails, so I know it can work..... its just this one doesn't want to play for some reason.

dalchina said:

Hi I have the latest build (14393.222) and use Sumatra - at one point it had an experimental version which produced thumbnails- but this is probably not supported now. I installed Nitro pdf reader- and that does produce thumbnails.

Maybe you'd like to try that just as an experiment for comparison?

If it's an Adobe specific issue, you may be better referring that to their forum. There have been a couple of issues with Adobe Reader and Win 10.

Cheers - I`ll install nitro as another comparison and report back. My guess is that it wont work as I`m suspecting this is something not right at the OS layer rather than the application layer, but its a good test nonetheless.

dalchina said:

Hmm, I've just tried Foxit R, and that as default is supposed to show thumbnails, but doesn't...

That's very interesting. I`ve installed Foxit Reader on a few different machines and also after a few reinstalls, and for me at least it has allowed thumbnails to display. Perhaps it is a little flaky.

dalchina said:

Well, I reset Foxit as default, and now it does display thumbnails... hey ho..

This all sounds jolly inconsistent to me - Foxit should be (and has been) able to consistently display thumbnails in explorer regardless of which reader is the default application. In fact, that's my default configuration, which I`ve used on 3 machines - I have foxit installed to provide a PDF printer and thumbnails - and I have Drawboard PDF as the default viewer.

I`ll have a play with Nitro at lunchtime and let you know the results.

dalchina said:

Well, I reset Foxit as default, and now it does display thumbnails... hey ho..

There is a problem with the latest Foxit update which it why Explorer preview doesn't work on x64 systems. They only included the x86 .dll file NOT the x64 .dll.

The fix can be found here http://forums.foxitsoftware.com/foru...689#post157689