Unable to delete thumbs.db

Anonymous
2023-03-22T08:55:44+00:00

I'm on the newest Win10 and am looking for a way to delete folders which only contain one file, the thumbs.db, and nothing else.

I've read several things in this thread (which is now closed) where some didn't help and others were too painful to be even tried (why should i have to boot in safe mode?).

Is there a easy way to delete those folders?

I'm often succeeding with restarting explorer.exe from the taskmanager's app tab (wondering why explorer.exe is the only process offering "restart" in its context menu) and then being quick enough to delete such folders before explorer grabs em again. But there are always some hard ones which somehow escape this hack.

For such the only working thing i know of is to actually end all explorer.exe processes, delete the folder from a cmd line with rmdir /S/Q "foldername" and restart explorer.exe. But both approaches are a pain because usually i have many explorer.exe windows open an don't like to restore them all manually because that's a waste of time.

Is there a proper way to delete those folders which doesn't involve hacking the registry, changing system wide settings, booting from a linux live cd or killing explorer.exe? After all their empty so i don't understand why there's the need to hold on to a thumbs.db which by then shouldn't contain any thumbs. Maybe there's a purge-unused-thumbs option somewhere?

Windows for home | Windows 10 | Files, folders, and storage

Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.

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  1. Anonymous
    2024-01-25T20:32:22+00:00

    Unfortunately this is not a valid solution for people who have to remove 10's, 100's, 1000's of folders that include thumbs.db. The other proposed solution with gpedit does not apply to Windows 10/11 Home edition.

    What a ridiculous issue this is. This should have been solved 30 years ago Microsoft.

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  2. Anonymous
    2023-09-27T17:22:55+00:00

    Thanks for the fix. We also discovered that if we renamed the Thumbs.db file to Thumbs.dat, we could delete it.

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  3. Anonymous
    2025-05-21T22:25:35+00:00

    Unable to move or delete folders due to that annoying thumbs.db file? Don't have Admin privelidges? I have discovered a quick and easy way to make it deletable:

    1. Right-Click the thumbs.db file.
    2. Edit in Notepad.
    3. Select all.
    4. Delete.
    5. Save.
    6. Select the thumbs.db file and delete.

    Poof! It's gone until it gets created again. Hurry and move or delete the folder before that happens. ;)

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  4. Anonymous
    2023-03-22T13:06:47+00:00

    How about the "Hide protected operating system files (Recommended)"? Can you check if it is enabled?

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  5. Anonymous
    2023-12-05T20:27:57+00:00

    In my case, I found renaming the folder allowed it to be deleted.

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