If icons on your Windows 10 are failing to show up, you should consider giving them a boost by increasing icon cache size through this simple guide.
What’s icon cache?
In order to speed up File Explorer in Windows 10, Windows keeps a copy of an icon’s thumbnail previews close by. This ensures new thumbnails aren’t generated each time you open a folder.
Thumbnails are one of the nicer features in modern operating systems which show you a miniature version of any image or video without you having to manually open it.
Lately, I’ve been facing a lot of problems with thumbnail previews in Windows 10. Windows simply fails to show them and when you’re working with hundreds of images at a time, this is something that can become an immense pain. No previews mean you simply will not have the idea as to which image is which as shown in the image below and you’re left with only one option and that is to click open each item to check it. Not any more – just increase the icon cache size!
We’ve previously covered one way of fixing this particular issue and that was through clearing thumbnail cache. However, one possible drawback of this is that if your images increase to the point when the cache becomes full, this will not help as upon getting cleared it will only reload the thumbnails up until it becomes full again leaving uncovered images without a preview.
To fix that, we’ve found another possible way to tackle this problem. You can increase thumbnail icon cache size in Windows 10 through the following steps. However we’d do like to point out that this doesn’t works out every time but there’s no harm in giving it a try. I’d suggest creating a system restore point at first to maximize your computer’s safety.
Step 1: Open regedit.
Step 2: Follow the following path to its end and double click on Explorer.
KEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionExplorer
Step 3: Right click anywhere in the right window and then click on New.
Step 4: Click on String Value.
Step 5: Rename it to Max cached icons.
Step 6: Enter 4096 for 4MB or 8192 for 8MB as shown in the image below.
Step 7: Click OK and restart Windows.
That’s it. We’d do like to stress again that it is not always successful. Do let us know if it was of benefit to you in the comments.