Thumbnail Database Cleaner is a free Windows thumbnail cache cleaner software. It lets you scan Windows directory (including the sub-directories) where Windows thumbnail cache is stored. After that, you can clean the image thumbnail cache of File Explorer (that includes desktop and other folders) and Windows will re-generate new cache of image thumbnails. You can also select whether you want to clean thumbnail cache of all or only some selected directories.
Windows also provides a built-in Disk Cleanup tool to clean thumbnails cache, but that wipes the entire cache of image thumbnails. Therefore, this software is handy because it gives you the choice if you want to clean thumbnail cache of all directories or only selected directories or folders. Apart from that, it also lets you see the path of folders where thumbnail cache are stored, size of cache, and date.
In the screenshot above, you can see the main interface of software where it shows thumbnail cache available in different folders.
How To Use This Free Windows Thumbnail Cache Cleaner Software?
Click on this link to get the zip file of this software. The software is portable and it requires .NET Framework 2.0 to run. Just extract its zip file and then execute ThumbsCleaner application file to open its interface.
It has a simple interface where only four options are available:
- Browse button to enter the path of directory where image thumbnail cache is stored. You don’t have to add the full path. If you want to find all thumbnail cache, then simply enter “C:\“, which is usually Windows drive.
- Include Subdirectories option. You should turn on this option so that you can get all the thumbnail cache of different folders.
- Start Search button.
- Stop Search button.
Now you can begin the search which may take some time depending on the total number of thumbnail cache files and size of total cache. When the search is completed, the list of all directories that contain image thumbnail cache will be visible. From that list, you can exclude some directories to prevent clearing their thumbnail cache.
When everything is done, you can click Clean button to delete the image thumbnail cache. The cleaning process is really fast and it takes only a second.
You may also check How To Preview Image As Thumbnail In Context Menu and How To Preview SVG Files In Thumbnails View.
The Verdict:
I really like this software because it is very easy to use and only few mouse clicks are needed to clear thumbnail cache. Image thumbnail cache is generated automatically by Windows so that users can preview images directly with thumbnail view mode. But if for some reason image thumbnails are corrupted or not working properly for some images, then clearing the image thumbnail cache can be useful. And for that, this simple software is a good option.
