When using Windows, there are several ways of viewing files and sorting them into a folder. It goes from list mode, to the display of all the details, to list or with small, medium, large or very large icons.
The very large icons, for some types of files, become previews so, if you open a folder of images with the preview view, you will see the thumbnails of the photos so you can recognize which ones to view without having to open them one by one.
For videos, on the other hand, the preview is the first frame and even some documents such as PDF are viewable in a preview.
You can improve the display of previews for videos and the preview of PDF, see better the details of each file or you can choose to disable once and for all the preview view so you can open folders faster (on pc less powerful can slow loading a lot).
Turning off the way to preview files in folders means speeding up the loading of large image folders because Windows does not have to create thumbnails for all files.
By clicking on the icon of the display mode in a folder (the button with the down arrow at the top right) you can change the display mode of the open folder.
The same thing can be done by pressing the right mouse button on the blank and then selecting the menu.
If you want to disable the display of previews for all folders, you must instead enter the folder options from the Control Panel or from the Tools menu of an open folder.
In the options, go to the Display tab and put a check in the " Always show icons, never previews " item.
Then click on " Apply to all folders " to give immediate effect to the change.
If you want to see the previews of the files again, just remove the cross and apply the change again.
If, on the other hand, you like viewing previews, then there are some safe and recommended tools to improve it .
1) In another article we saw that the SageThumbs program allows you to see all the previews of each type of image on Windows, including file formats that are not natively supported (Like PSDs).
2) It is possible to enable s the preview view also for all video file formats with the Media Preview program.
This small and simple plugin for Windows Explorer works on 32-bit and 64-bit XP, Vista and Windows 7, without dependencies with other environments, so it integrates natively into the system.
The program, by default, uses high quality settings to make previews of media files in Windows folders.
If this slows down the loading process, you can change the quality of the thumbnails from the settings of the Media Preview.
3) To see the PDF previews instead of the icons in the folders, you can install the PDF Preview plugin which allows you to open PDFs with a double click, without programs, as if you zoomed in on the preview .
All these three programs mentioned above integrate into Windows by modifying their behavior, without remaining in memory and without consuming resources.
For PDFs and photos, documents can be previewed on one side of the window using the preview pane mode in Windows 7 folders (the button on the far right, near the question mark).
Finally, a little trick allows you to expand each column to the maximum in the detail view : select a file and then press the CTRL + key combination (the most of the numeric keypad).
