Windows 11: Thumbnail previews do not show on folders

I agree with everybody else that is complaining about this. To not have thumbnail previews is completely ridiculous for those of us who have hundreds if not thousands of folders on our systems.

I sincerely hope this feature being lost is either an oversight, or due to a bug that couldn't be fixed in time for release, because this is easily the most obnoxious aspect of Windows 11 for me as it is, as others have mentioned, directly hindering my work. Seeing as I had no need (and honestly shouldn't need) to create more detailed folder names in Windows 10 since I could easily see the preview image, I simply numbered or dated folders. With no preview images on the folders, outside of very recent images, I now have to enter every folder until I find the one I'm looking for. This, when dealing with thousands of folders containing images, is an extremely strenuous and time consuming task.

As was suggested, I did leave feedback in the feedback hub, but unfortunately, until this bafflingly omitted feature returns, I'm going to have to downgrade back to Windows 10 as this is too much of a hassle for me to be willing to deal with.

Hi,

Same problem here and like others really, really need this back.

HOWEVER! My default assumption is this got "broken" broke in changes to 11 and they did not want to delay release so just had to turn it off for the time being. I would assume it will come back quickly in future update.

For example, another trivial feature that "disappeared" was that you cannot move the taskbar to the vertical left or right of screen. Again, it would be near impossible to imagine that MS thought this would be enhancement. When I followed the registry hack I found on the web it did indeed move it to the left or right. But no icons. So again, it seemed obvious a bug.

It does seem hard to imagine that such obvious UI bugs got overlooked but releasing a major new version of other software I've seen stranger things happen. All the focus is on the new features important things like security and just by quirk these UI features that have been there forever just happened to never have been included in the standard regression tests is my suspicion.

Finally, I think what would be really helpful to all is if someone could confirm these are bugs to be fixed. Perhaps these are already on an errata list?

Jay

Love to give this a try, but I am not able to get it to work. I followed the steps you described and in each folder a .ico file was generated. However, File Explorer is still showing the same folder icon. How do I actually utilize the generated .ico file to replace the generic folder icon? Seems like there are extra steps missing.

Hi Jason, I've inserted a picture with what I did and the result as an example. Maybe try to do a restart if it doesn't update the folder.

From what I can see what the software does is a desktop.ini config file along with a thumb.ico file and applies that icon to the desired folder. It is something simple but very helpful. Windows used to natively do this and it constantly updated the icon with your latest edited files.