Excellent Tips To Turn Off Thumbnail Preview For Images And Disable Fax Viewer and Windows Picture In Windows XP
In Window XP, you will normally see previews for files containing pictures, photos and images in a thumbnail style, under the Details section in the left windowpane of Windows Explorer. The preview is automatically generated and displayed when you try to view folders in Thumbnail view.
If you try to open the images or pictures by double-clicking on the thumbnails which are associated with various graphic formats, these pictures open in Fax Viewer and Windows Picture instead of your favorite image viewer/ editor. This happens because of default action on the file which compels it to open using Fax Viewer and Windows Picture.
It is possible to disable or turn off the thumbnail preview of pictures, photos, graphics and images in Windows XP. You can also disable Fax Viewer and Windows Picture as well as remove graphic format associations with default viewer. Just follow the below mentioned steps:
- Go to “Run” command box by clicking on the Start button. Type “Cmd” and press Enter key.
- Command Prompt window will be displayed. In the command prompt, type the below mentioned command and press Enter key.
regsvr32 /u shimgvw.dll
Once you run the above command, all image and picture files will be shown just as icons and not thumbnails. Also when you double-click to open any graphic, it will launch in your favorite image viewer/ editor.
If you wish to re-enable image preview or turn on Fax Viewer and Windows Picture anytime, just run the below mentioned command, followed by “Enter”.
regsvr32 shimgvw.dll
You may also use the system registry trick if you are unable to turn off image preview, Fax viewer and Windows Picture using the above technique. For the registry trick, use the following steps:
- Open the Run command box, by clicking on the “Run” option in Start Menu.
- Type in “regedit” to open the Registry Editor.
- Then go to the registry key mentioned below
- HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\SystemFileAssociations\image\ShellEx\ContextMenuHandlers\ShellImagePreview
- It is advisable to take a backup before moving ahead to the next step. You will need to export the registry key. For doing this, just right-click on “ShellImagePreview”, choose the option” Export” and get it saved to a file.
- Double-click on registry value name “Default” present in the right segment. Clear the value data of “Default” to leave it blank.
Incase you wish to restore preview action on picture and image files, just set the value data of “Default” back to {e84fda7c-1d6a-45f6-b725-cb260c236066}, which is the default original value. As another option, you may simply restore your backup registry file that you had saved.