How to Repair Damaged or Corrupted Thumbs.db Files

By
Tim Fisher
Photo of Tim Fisher, Lifewire GM and Writer
Tim Fisher
Senior Vice President & Group General Manager, Tech & Sustainability
  • Emporia State University
Tim Fisher has more than 30 years' of professional technology experience. He's been writing about tech for more than two decades and serves as the VP and General Manager of Lifewire.
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Updated on June 17, 2022

What to Know

  • Open folder with damaged thumbs.db file > right-click file > Delete.
  • To recreate file, select View > Thumbnails from the menu in the folder from which you deleted the thumbs.db file.
  • Doing this will initiate the Thumbnails view and will automatically create a new copy of the file.

This article explains how to repair a damaged or corrupted thumbs.db file.

How to Repair Damaged or Corrupted Thumbs.db Files

Sometimes, one or more of these corrupted files can cause problems in Windows when navigating around folders with multimedia content, or they could be the cause of error messages like this kernel32.dll error: 

Explorer caused an invalid page fault in module Kernel32.dll

Repairing thumbs.db files is a pretty simple task considering Windows will regenerate the DB file when the particular folder it's contained in is viewed in a special way.

  1. Open the folder that you suspect the damaged or corrupted thumbs.db file to be contained in.

  2. Locate the file.

    thumbs.db file in windows 8

    If you can't see the file, your computer may be configured to not show hidden files. If that's the case, change the folder options to allow the display of hidden files and protected operating system files. See How Do I Show Hidden Files and Folders in Windows? for instructions.

  3. Once you locate the thumbs.db file, right click it and choose Delete.

    If you can't delete the file, you may need to change the folder view. To do this, select View and then choose either Tiles, Icons, List, or Details. Depending on the version of the Windows you're using, some of these options may vary slightly.

  4. To recreate the file, select View and then Thumbnails from the menu in the folder from which you deleted the thumbs.db file. Doing this will initiate the Thumbnails view and will automatically create a new copy of the file.

Tips

Not all versions of Windows use the thumbs.db file. The thumbnail database thumbcache_xxxx.db might instead be centrally located in this folder: 

%userprofile%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer
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