I started flipping out, thinking that somehow my pictures were mysteriously being deleted when it turns out that the thumbnails are just showing the wrong picture. Wouldn’t be a problem if they were all labeled, but a lot of them are just titled by date and number, not by subject. That would be LOGICAL. [For example, a picture is labeled “<boyfriend’s name>” with the thumbnail showing a mailbox.] This is inconvenient. And creepy. And inadvertently led to me sending my boyfriend pictures of a grove of trees and a gravestone instead of pictures of us.
So I refreshed the folder…several times. I switched from icons to lists to thumbnails.
I even restarted the computer, hoping that perhaps in the time it took to wind down and start back up, the thumbnails would get together, decide it was a good prank, and to go back to doing their job correctly. No such luck.
This is only a problem in this one folder.
So, why are my thumbnails not showing the correct picture?
XP places a file in each folder which contains images. That file contains the thumbnails. When you rename a file, the problem you describe can happen. When that happens, you sometimes have to delete the file manually to solve the problem (Windows will re-generate the thumbnails file the next time you visit the folder).
I don’t have an XP machine here right now, so I can’t tell you the name of the file, sorry. It’s probably a hidden file, so you need to go into “folder preferences” from the menu and indicate that you want to see hidden and system files.
If you do a lot of rearranging of photos, or renaming them from the dumb sequential numeric names your camera probably gives them, you’ll have this problem rather often.
There’s a setting in Explorer to prevent Windows from keeping the thumbs.db file, so it’ll regenerate it on the fly each time. That’s slower, but it sure cures your problem. The setting is on the menu under Tools | Folder Options … Click the
“View” tab and about the 7th checkbox in the list is “Do not cache thumbnails”.