When you use VMware view for providing VDI desktops, you probably use the VMware OS Optimization Tool (OSOT) to improve the performance of the desktop.
This tool takes quite some shortcuts in optimizing, blocking a lot of basic functionality which you might find handy. Most things can be re-enabled quite easily, but recently I’ve run into an issue with the thumbnail view in Windows Explorer, which proved to be quite a challenge to get re-enabled.
The thumbnail view in Windows Explorer can particularly handy when using photo’s. One of my customers did use this functionality and with his refreshed desktop (upgraded to a new build of Windows 10 using a new image optimized with the OSOT tool), he missed this functionality.
The documentation of the OSOT tool does not describe (or at least I was not able to find any usable details) what setting is actually changed to disable the thumbnail view. When searching the internet you will find a lot of useful articles describing how to enable or disable the thumbnail view. This can be achieved in a lot of ways, but almost all of the have in common that they are user level settings, not computer settings.
Every article I run into when trying to get to the bottom of this issue, covered only the user settings. Even the group policy settings you have available in Windows only cover user level settings related to the thumbnails.
As you can guess from my previous description, the OSOT tool disables thumbnail view using a computer level setting. When looking at the registry key that has been used, it looks like an ordinary group policy settings, except it is not listed in the Group Policy references sheet, nor within the group policy settings.
So when trying to re-enable thumbnail view in Windows explorer, for instance after running the OSOT tool, use the following registry key to get thumbnail view working again:
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer
Name: DisableThumbnails
Type: REG_DWORD
Value: 0x0
In case you want to disable thumbnail view, of course you can use the value 0x1
As this is a local machine setting, this setting will have effect on every user on the computer involved. A lot of other settings are available on a user level, but as explained, lots of articles already cover those, so I did not include them in this article.
One of the effects you might see when this setting is enabled (so thumbnails are disabled using the above registry setting), when trying to enable the thumbnail view in the computers performance settings, you will see the option to enable thumbnail view and you are able to select the option, however, when you check the settings directly after changing it, you will see it is unchecked again. Using the above setting allows you to enable or disable it on a user level again.
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