The Windows operating system saves thumbnails in a file called thumbs.db whenever you change the folder view mode to thumbnail view. This basically caches the image thumbnails so that they are displayed faster the next time you open that folder with that view mode.
I personally have disabled the thumbnail creation on my system as I see it more of a way to leak private information. Anyone with access can look at the contents of thumbs.db files to check out what a user has been looking at in the past. This may even work if the images used to generate the thumbnails are long gone.
Thumbcache Viewer is a new portable Open Source program for Windows to display the contents of a thumbs.db file. The developer has created a command line and graphical user interface version which need to be downloaded separately.
The first thing that you need to do after starting the program is to click on File > Open to load a file browser to locate and load a thumbs.db file from a connected storage device. Please note that you may need to disable the preference to hide important operating system files automatically on the system to see the thumbs.db files in that file browser. The program displays the files, filenames, sizes, checksum and hash information in its interface. A click on a header sorts the table so that it is possible to sort by name or size for instance.
The selection of an entry in the database displays the thumbnail image in a small viewer window. You can move around with the mouse or arrow keys and scale the image with the + or – keys to zoom in or out of the thumbnail image. Alternatively, you can use the mouse wheel to zoom in or out as well.
Files can be renamed by clicking again on the selected thumbnail in the table. Just enter a different file name and press enter to complete the process and save the new file name.
You can download the latest version of Thumbcache Viewer from the Google Code project site. An alternative is the Thumbs.db viewer and cleaner which I reviewed back in 2007.
© Martin Brinkmann for gHacks Technology News | Latest Tech News, Software And Tutorials, 2011. | Permalink |
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Post tags: portable software, thumbnail previews, thumbnails, thumbs.db, windows software
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