Folder thumbnails

I'm finding it hard to understand why Microsoft went with this design choice where folder thumbnails are obscured by the horizontal design of the folders. It makes folder navigation extremely difficult for people who have many image folders, like photographers and digital artists etc.



Even stranger is how you can't customize folders to the old vertical look, where thumbnails looked like this:



The horizontal folders is one of these inexplicable design choices they went with when creating Windows 11. It makes no sense.

If anyone has a suggestion how to get full thumbs back, I'd appreciate it and save me countless hours of annoying navigation in the future.

Did you search in the forum?
Or better yet, in the Tutorials?

I think this is what will help you:

Hi

I'm not looking to disable thumbnails. I'm looking for a way to get thumbnails to display better instead of being obscured by the horizontal folder icon. Like in Windows 10. see examples above.

you could replace imageres.dll and shell32.dll with win10 versions.. not sure what else that would impact off-hand though... i'd look into it more before executing.

Same issue, this is almost pointless to have folder icons!

Even if MS keep the folders the way they are, the least they could do is have the thumbnail images cover the entire folder instead of half folder.

Here's my notes from playing around with Customizer God:
1. Customizer God hasn't been updated for W11, and throws many errors. But it can still replace the folder icon bitmaps.

2. Under General Icons, you can replace Icon #6 with a "blank" icon. This the overlay covering the bottom half of the folder preview.

3. Unfortunately, the thumbnail is horizontally oriented. Even if you replaced W11's front & back folder icons with W10's vertical folder, the preview image is still horizontal.

4. Windows doesn't rescale the image to fit inside the boundaries. So the top and bottom 25% of the thumbnail are missing. This would be terrible if you had full-height images.

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us...s/724d1004-0893-48de-a345-e721cf32edd2?page=4

Was investigating custom folder icons and stubled onto this. Because the thread was so new decided to post.

So I was making a batch script for my chrildren (and me.... don't tell anyone ) to make folders with a custom icon.

You can get a direct link to an icon online (must be .ico file) and it does the desktop.ini and file / folder attribute stuff for you.
Translated the script and notes to English so you can check it before running!

SuperSvenkka said:

Was investigating custom folder icons and stubled onto this. Because the thread was so new decided to post.

So I was making a batch script for my chrildren (and me.... don't tell anyone ) to make folders with a custom icon.

You can get a direct link to an icon online (must be .ico file) and it does the desktop.ini and file / folder attribute stuff for you.
Translated the script and notes to English so you can check it before running!

Click to expand...