Change the preview thumbnail quality to speed up Windows 7

You can change the quality of thumbnails in Windows 7 and make a custom settings. The size can be changed easily by selecting from drop down menu in the extreme right top corner; but, you have to follow a trick to change the quality of the thumbnails.

Regarding size, here is a screenshot of default sized thumbnails:

You can change it easily:

Problem is that, when you browse a folder with lot of pictures, it takes a long time to load them. You can easily reduce the time by decreasing the quality a bit. Here is how to do it.

Step 1

Click Start button; type “regedit” (without the quotation marks) and hit enter from keyboard:

It may ask for security prompt, just accept it. Registry editor will open.

Step 2

Find the following string:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer

Right click on the right sided pane and Create a 32 bit DWORD value called ThumbnailQuality, and set the value between 50 and 100:

Double click the newly created value; i.e. ThumbnailQuality. Put any value between 50-100:

Step 3

99 percent work is done. To make it effective, you can either restart your computer or restart the explorer.

Note: You practically not see any change in quality of thumbnails if you are not using biggest sized thumbnail for preview; but will soon discover it is working by increase in thumbnail loading speed.