The Performance Cost of Previews
Windows 11’s File Explorer is highly visual, designed to show you miniature previews (thumbnails) of your images, videos, and even some documents instead of generic file icons. While this makes browsing a folder full of family photos much easier, generating these thumbnails requires system resources. If you open a directory containing thousands of high-resolution images or large video files, you might notice your computer’s fan spin up, the folder taking a long time to load, and the File Explorer window becoming temporarily unresponsive. This happens because Windows is working hard in the background to automatically create and cache a thumbnail for every single file.
Forcing File Explorer to Use Icons
To improve folder loading speeds and stop Windows 11 from automatically creating thumbnails for your files, you must force File Explorer to display standard icons instead.
Open File Explorer (Windows key + E). Click the three horizontal dots (See more) in the top command bar and select Options from the menu. This opens the Folder Options dialog. Click on the View tab at the top. In the “Advanced settings” list, look at the very first option under the “Files and Folders” category. It is labeled Always show icons, never thumbnails. By default, this box is unchecked. Click the checkbox to check it. Click Apply, then click OK. From now on, when you open a folder, Windows will instantly display the generic icon for the file type (e.g., a blue image icon for a JPEG) rather than attempting to generate a custom preview, resulting in significantly faster navigation.