Howdy. I'm a photographer and graphic artist, and I have lots of folders with lots of images in them. I've been using the Thumbnail view for years, and it has always worked great. One feature I've liked is that the folder icons in thumbnail view would show four mini thumbnails of the first four files in the folder, excluding txt, html, and other non-image files. This aids a lot in seeing what's in the folders without having to open each one.
Today that all changed, and I can't get the old way back. I first noticed that the mini thumbnails displayed on the folder icons were no longer the first four images, but randomly selected images. Okay, I can live with that. But then I realized that all of the folder mini thumbnail images included text file thumbnails. Now, instead of seeing four mini thumbnails of the images within the folders, I see maybe two, and the other two are thumbnails of ini files or html files or txt files. This is very annoying. I've tried resetting preferences in D-Opus and in Windows via right-clicking on the folder and opening the Customize tab, but I can't get the non-graphics mini icons to stop becoming part of the folder thumbnail image. Nor can I get the generated folder mini thumbnails to be generated from the first four images. These two are probably part of the same problem.
I do want the thumbnails of html, txt, ini, and other non graphics files to be displayed as thumbnails in the folders, and their being displayed as such has never created a problem in generating mini thumbnails of the images for the folder icons before. Did I change something in D-Opus? Did I change something in Windows XP? Did another graphics program take control my images display? Did some alien force hover by my window and zap my system?
It's always been the case that any file Opus can show a thumbnail for is eligible for inclusion in the folder thumbs, so it must just be luck that you've never noticed it in the past.
What did change in the most recent update is the method that Opus uses to select images for the folder thumbs. Originally, Opus would read the directory and simply pick the first four files it finds - that is, it was essentially random. Currently, however, Opus will specifically pick the four most recently modified files in the folder.
It would probably be a reasonable idea in a future version to allow a wildcard pattern to be specified to allow or prevent certain filetypes from being included in the folder thumbs. In the mean time, the only real way you can control it is by file date - if you change the last modified date on the errant text files to be earlier than the image files in the same folder, then Opus should no longer select them.
Thanks for explaining the changes and how the files are now selected for mini thumbs. In the old way I could modify file names to place which ones I wanted as the first four. Normally the desktop.ini file was alphabetically further down in the folder than the first four image names, so it never became a mini icon, and I never noticed it. As the desktop.ini files are hidden, is there a way to tell D-Opus not to use hidden files to generate mini icons without telling D-Opus not to display hidden files at all?
Go to Settings -> Preferences - Plugins - Viewers, select Text-File Thumbnails and click Configure.
Now go through each of the file types in the list on the left, and clear the Include in folder thumbnails checkbox.
Text files should then stop appearing in folder thumbnails which are generated from then on. (I'm not sure if the existing thumbnails are cached, so you might still see text files for some folders until the folders change and get freshly made thumbnails.)
I've also just updated the plugin so that it will always skip hidden files when asked for folder thumbnails. You should see the new behaviour in the next Opus release.