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Wes03432545's avatar
Wes03432545
Copper Contributor
Oct 10, 2025

Media files (videos, images) with "archive" icon and no preview thumbnails. How to fix?

I have a lot of these files with the archive cardboard box on the bottom left corner. Preview thumbnail should be generating for these files but it's not. These files were on a different machine probably with different owners and stuff like that. Not all files are broken, just some of them. I can access the files just fine. There is absolutely no problem with them except for the thumbnail. I've already tried restarting explorer.exe, deleting the thumbs cache. I've also tried:

attrib -R -S -H /S /D
takeown /F "D:\Media" /R /D Y
icacls "D:\Media" /grant "%username%":(F) /T
icacls "D:\Media" /reset /T

and then again cleanmgr to reset the thumbs cache again. And also tried to delete thumbache files manually. Nothing worked.

I also did chkdisk /F /R and nothing broken was found.

The files are not compressed and there is no bitlocker enabled.

The weirdest thing is, if I copy and paste such files in the very same folder they are in, the preview is correctly generated on the copy of the file!!! 

This is clearly a solution but I'd rather not do that manually as hey are several hundreds files that are broken (not all) scattered in dozens of folders I'd rather not open one by one.

What could be the problem?

2 Replies

  • Timothy1525's avatar
    Timothy1525
    Iron Contributor

    Open a folder that contains the media files in File Explorer. Click the View menu and select Options. Click the View tab. Uncheck "Always show icons, never thumbnails" and click OK.

    • Wes03432545's avatar
      Wes03432545
      Copper Contributor

      Thank you for the answer Timothy but that's one of the first things I've tried. Didn't help unfortunately!

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