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Why Is Aggressive Thumbnail Preview Cache Refresh Not A Bigger Deal?
It would seem that with the Fall Creators Update has come some exceedingly aggressive Automatic Maintenance on the part of Windows, at least for some users, when it comes to thumbnail previews in Explorer. Let me say first that ylm has an excellent solution to this issue below, a simple registry tweak we'll call the DWORD fix.
After Creators Update 2 thumbnails cache keeps auto-deleting Solved - Page 3 - Windows 10 Forums
My thumbnails were refreshing on an almost daily basis until I found that thread and tried the DWORD fix. Problem seemingly solved! However, since then I needed to do a hard reboot, which resulted in my thumbnail cache being cleared once again.
Without thumbnail previews, Windows is unusable to me. I need at least tiles view for documents, and large icons for pictures and videos. I have countless folders with dozens of files that are impossible for me to navigate in small icon, list, or details views. I imagine there are others who feel this way, at least for their pictures and videos. Waiting on thumbnails to refresh for each folder gets very tedious very quickly.
So, my immediate question: is there another minor tweak that will prevent anything from clearing the thumbnail cache after a hard reboot? I do not want to mess around too much with system maintenance protocols or disable anything more than absolutely necessary. I'm sure Windows (mostly) knows what it's doing. But I really need it to leave my thumbnails alone once and for all.
Beyond that, some larger questions:
- What is the deal here? Why be so aggressive with the maintenance? To save disk space? Who worries about that anymore? And regularly rewriting thumbnail files to an SSD (for those who have one) is just going to shorten its lifespan. I thought Windows had gotten fairly good about SSD management.
- Why is this not a bigger deal? I would expect to see more complaints from more people about regularly having to wait for the thumbnails of their family photo albums and vacation pics and vids to reload.
- Above all, is this a feature or a bug? Is post-FCU Automatic Maintenance supposed to be this aggressive about things like the thumbnail cache. Or is this a problem with only some Windows users based on some flaw in their OS? I'm not sure which is worse.
I have never in all my years using Windows had an issue like this with thumbnail previews. The DWORD fix is great, and mostly makes the problem go away. But it is not a permanent, all-encompassing fix. If anyone has any ideas for one, please share. And I'm curious to hear from the collective wisdom here regarding the larger questions I posed as well.
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