Windows 11: Thumbnail previews do not show on folders

Hi,

I used the Win - 11 feedback hub. You can click an option to submit online which will then send you updates. There was already a topic in there already, but it encourages you to add to it. They need to know how to prioritize so get your voice in.

It is not a thread like here. You cannot see the other people's input. That is because of privacy. At the hub you are welcome to upload anything relevant such as dump files and screenshots. So obviously they cannot share that.

Alot of people here. I all who have not already done this add their voice I think they will hear it and fix it.

Has anyone heard explicitly from MS that this is a dropped feature or a bug? It is really hard to believe they dropped it intentionally.

This is worth open another MS account to add my voice more than once !!! :)

Jay

Hi synapse_947,

Unless I am reading the work around you suggest incorrectly, I think you have really missed the issue in this thread. What you are showing has been there from about day 1 of windows. You can manually asign any arbitrary image as an icon to about anything. Shortcut, File, Folder ...

That is not what this is about. This is about windows automatically picking that icon in a very useful way. In previous windows if you viewed multiple folders in a directory in "Thumbnails View" Windows automatically picked content from within the folder and used it as the icon. For photos this is really, really useful. It is a little bit more sophisticated, but it essentially picks the thumbnail of the first item in the folder to be the folder icon.

For photos the folder icon becomes the first image in the directory. It is really, really useful. If I have 10 directories of photos from different times of the year, I can almost instantly see the directory I want because I recognize that photo.

Does that clear it up for you.?

Thanks,

Jay

Hi Paul,

I am Dave, I will help you with this.

Currently Windows 11 does not support showing thumbnails on folders, like previous versions of Windows.

The best option is to open the Feedback Hub (Windows Key + F) and provide your feedback on this lack of functionality in Windows 11, to the developers, the more people that look for a feature, the more likely it is to be added.

This is really poor. Whoever decided to omit this doesn’t fully understand how people use Windows efficiently. That this helpful feature was omitted has really slowed down my workflow. This needs to make a reappearance in an update in the near future (and option for bigger thumbnails - extra large is still too small on 4K at 150 scaling)

Hi all

As Dave says above, the best thing to do is provide feedback on the Windows 11 Feeback hub. To do this, either click the windows key + F, or click on the start icon on your computer and type in the words 'Feedback hub' and it will show you the Feedback Hub App. Click on this to open.

I don't work for Microsoft and am just a punter like everyone else, but I started a thread on the Feedback hub 3 months ago on this issue called "no folder contents previews in Windows 11", so do a search for that in the search bar in the hub.

You can then either upvote it (currently nearly 500 upvotes) or you can provide a comment. The more people who do this the more likely it is that Microsoft will do something about the issue (they have looked at the thread and provided a totally useless update!).

As a professional photographer, not being able to see the contents of folders via a thumbnail preview is doing my nut in and making my working life really difficult! The issue needs sorting asap.