Information Security, Web, Networks and Systems

Saturday, July 13, 2013

Prevent Windows 8 automatically delete thumbnail cache

11:07 AM Posted by Deepal , , , , 2 comments
Its really annoying in Windows 8, everytime we go to a folder which contains hundreds of images or video files, image/video thumbnails are started appearing and we see the green bar is loading in the address bar. This is really annoying and in my case this lead to Windows explorer not responding situations and even restarting windows explorer. This is an issue in windows 8 which does not keep thumbnail cache for a long time. It automatically deletes thumbnail cache and thumbnails are rebuilt when a user browse to a folder containing files/sub folders. It is a simple way to prevent this automatic deletion.

First, go to the folder,
C:Users\AppDataLocalMicrosoftWindows

There, you'll see a folder called Explorer

This is the place where windows keeps Windows Explorer cache including thumbnail cache. To prevent automatically deletion of the files in this directory, we have to create a security rule as follows.

Right click the folder Explorer and go to properties.


Then go to Security tab and click Advanced button below.



In the dialog box next, click Add button to create a new rule.

Then click on the Select a principal link


Then a small window should popup to select users that the rule should apply. Type your current username and click on Check Names. If you typed your username correct, a suggestion would appear accordingly and then hit OK.

Then set the settings as following image describes,
  • Set type : Deny
  • Click on Show Advanced Permissions link and then check following shown items.

Then click OK .

This procedure creates a rule which denies your username to delete content in the Explorer folder. Then, when you are logged into your account in windows 8, windows cannot delete the thumbnail cache with your permissions. That would solve our problem.

But there is a simple issue here. If you ever want to perform a disk clean up with cleaning up thumbnail cache, you won't be able to complete it since you are denied deleting thumbnail cache. So if you want to delete the thumbnail cache, first you have to remove this rule.

2 comments:

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.