Picture icon thumbnail

Polski · May 6, 2024

First I'd like to say I am NOT a fan of windows 11. I am however forced to use it as my work computer.
I would like to be able to show thumbnails of ONLY my picture related icons. I do not want thumbnail s for all my other desktop icons as this makes it way to difficult for me to find the shortcut/file I'm looking for( I'm dyslexic and the thumbnail view with document files/shortcuts makes it very difficult for me to find the file I want). So is there a way to display the thumbnail for pictures only? A registry hack would be fine.

spapakons · May 8, 2024

Click on the Search icon on the taskbar and type Control Panel. Open it. If you see grouped settings, click at the top right and select Large icons. Now double-click on Explorer to open File Explorer settings. I don't remember where exaclty (currently at work without access to my PC), but there are several options and you check the box to enable them or uncheck the box to disable them. One of these options is to always show icons, never thumbnails. Check this box and you should always see the application icon for each file, rather than a thumbnail. If I remember correctly this doesn't affect the images (jpg, png etc).

Polski · May 8, 2024

Thanks for the reply but that option creates another issue for me. Too many of the thumbnails look the same, like notepad and doc files, making it difficult for me to find the files I want. (It's a dyslexia thing.)

spapakons · May 8, 2024

Keep the default blue notepad icon for text files and change the Word document icon to a different color. This was easy in Windows 7 and earlier. To do it in Windows 11 you have to manually change the icon value in Registry. If you have Microsoft Word the default document icon should be a blue W.