file explorer not showing thumbnails for onedrive folder

I had the same issue and none of the suggestions found here helped, so I started to experiment myself and  I managed to fix it. Here is what I did:

1. Unlink your PC from OneDrive
2. Move all sub-folders (or just the once with files with bad, no-show thumbnails) from the OneDrive folder somewhere else (does not matter where, even to the same drive, just outside of the OneDrive folder)
3. Copy (NOT move), all the folders that you just moved, back to the OneDrive folder.
4. Delete the original folders that you moved out from the OneDrive folder (Optional to save space on the local PC)
5. At this point, my file's thumbnails were restore and worked as they should. 
6. Sign back into OneDrive. If your OneDrive foder is not in the default place, make sure to select it at this time and chose your old existing OneDrive folder. 
7. It should take OneDrive just a few minutes to sync everything (mine synced over 120,000 files 654GB in 12 minutes)

 It appears that this is more of a Windows Explorer problem and not so much a OneDrive one.

Hope this will help some of you that experience this.

I had the same issue and to fix it I went into the settings of the One Drive app and disabled (untick) the Files On Demand service then hit OK. Then after a restart of the PC all thumbnails within my One Drive folders had returned.

No I idea why this works but it did for me and hopefully will do for you also.

 

Giant Wookie, 

By unchecking 'Files On Demand' we consume the space on our physical hard-drive hence thumbnails work. 

Ideally, 'Files on Demand' should allow us to see thumbnails irrespective if files being downloaded to the PC or remaining in the cloud. 

If anyone knows the resolution without having to store all files locally, it will be much appreciated.

Hi,  I agree this is very impractical. 

Here is what I have confirmed and haven't confirmed:

I did confirm that if I moved the files outside of my OneDrive folder location to another local folder (on the same drive and on the same PC) ALL of the thumbnails work.  ... they were slow to generate, but they did work.

I also confirmed Copying the files from my OneDrive folder to a local folder, ALL of the thumbnails worked.

Here's a tip.  Pause OneDrive, Move all the files out of the onedrive location.  Once this is done, the new location will regenerate the thumbnails.  After this is done.  Press Control+Z (UNDO) or simply move the files back into the OneDrive location, then unpause onedrive.  This seems to work.

This is definitely a OneDrive to Windows 10 issue as I do NOT have this issue with OneDrive and Windows 7.

I also confirmed that if I quit the OneDrive application, kill the explorertask, relaunch the task explorer, do a disk clean up to wipe all of the thumbnails here:

1. Open File Explorer.
2. On the left pane, click This PC.
3. Right-click the C: drive where Windows 10 is installed, and select Properties.
4. Click the Disk Cleanup button.
5. Check the Thumbnails option, and uncheck all the other options.

All of this did nothing.  While the thumbnails regenerated, the ones that did not have a thumbnail didn't regenerate again.

This confirmation actually worked ... temporarily.  If you go the the search and type in something like .jpg.  ALL of the thumbnails show in the pictures that did not previously have thumbnails.  However, when I close the search, it goes back to the original folder and the thumbnails are not there. 

So, then I started playing with permissions and ownerships of the drive.  I found that the ownership wasn't me on that drive.  I changed the owner to me from some weird string.  That did nothing.

I did find, however, that if I opened each file, then closed it, it generated a thumbnail.    I had to open each file.  This doesn't work if I open one and arrow right to the next one.  SO ... what I did was selected all files and then pressed enter.   This, again, did nothing.

Next, my suspect was the default windows 10 viewer.  I went to the windows app store and installed 123 Photo Viewer.  After that I went to the default apps part of windows 10 and changed the default viewer to 123 Photo Viewer.  This, after repeating everything above, did nothing.

Nothing I tried seemed to work and stick.  I gave up an installed XYplorer.  I'm not a rep for them nor do I get money for promoting them.  At least with this app, I can view all the thumbnails even though it's SLOW! 

Last, I tried to rename all of the files in the folder because I have some files that read just fine where others do not.  This doesn't work either.

I would like to add that when I press F5 (to refresh the screen), I can momentarily see the thumbnails, but then the file type quickly overwrites the thumbnails.  This is especially noticeable when I put it on medium thumbnails (more on screen).  I can see the wave wash over them from thumbnails back to file type.  I'm going to try to find a the process that's running after the first one - maybe I can isolate the culprit that's overwriting the thumbnails. 

I am completely out of options.  I cannot copy 80K pictures out of onedrive and then copy them back into onedrive in hopes of getting the thumbnails back. 

Windows 10 - you guys need to fix this.

That has worked for the files that I can see. Specifically SOLIDWORKS parts and assemblies. Thanks for that.