Thumbs.db Extractor

One of the first settings that I change after installing Windows on a new computer is the creation of those thumbs.db files that get automatically created by Windows. The thumbs.db file contains small thumbs of many popular image formats in the directory which is both a privacy risk and a performance drain. The files are created for the thumbnail view in Windows Explorer and a file will be created if the thumbnail view is picked from the available views.

Each image is represented as a jpg image in the thumbs.db file which makes it relatively easy to extract those images again. The thumbnails are stored in a centralized location in Windows Vista with the name thumbcache_xxx.db where xxx is a number between 1 and 999. That folder is located at %sysroot%\Users\Owner\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer.

A flexible small tool that can extract all images from thumbs.db files is Thumbs Extract. It’s a command line utility and the command is ThumbsExtract.exe path to thumbs.db, for example ThumbsExtract.exe c:\thumbs.db if the file is located on the c:\ drive.