Thumbnail view of folders

Hej there,

is it possible to teach DOpus, that if I'm in thumbnail-mode, having a folder with many subfolders, that the subfolders only shows thumbnails of the files inside, if that subfolder doesn't have a personalized icon for itself (by using desktop.ini)?

It should happen automatically, as long as "Folder thumbnails via the shell" has not been turned off.

Thanks for your fast answer, Leo!

You're right, if I checkmark this the use of desktop.ini will be performed correctly. But then I won't get preview Images of files inside anymore even within folders without desktop.ini (exactly as Win11 does itself).

I've switched that option off because somewhere is noted that as being neccessary by using Icaros. Then desktop.ini will be used, if no other graphical files are in that folder. With other graphical files inside desktop.ini will be used for a short time (correctly without surrounding folder-symbol). After a short amount of time, as thumbnail creation for files inside has been done, the desktop.ini-icon disappears and the previews of the files inside with all-surrounding folder symbol comes up.

Microsoft broke/removed shell folder thumbnails in Windows 11 but they have said they will be adding it back soon.

We'll also be adding an option to use custom icons for folders which have them when it's Opus generating the folder thumbnails, but that won't be ready for a while at least.

So on Win11 you should be able to get the combination of both icons and folder thumbnails again in the future, one way or the other.

Is it possible to display folders, containing images/media (Media:configured for thumbnail view mode) as thumbanils automatically? It would be so useful when having a main folder having several sub folders having sub categoreies. It's a pain to save each folder formats.


You can automatically switch to thumbnails mode when in a folder which contains mostly images.

But you mean when in a parent folder where the subs-folders contain mostly images? You'd need to use a script for that (handling the OnAfterFolderChange event), and I think it would be quite slow as it would have to look in all the sub-folders. I'm also not sure how it would work in the common situation where you have a mixture of sub-folder types, since the parent folder can either be in thumbnails mode or not.

Better to just configure those paths to display as thumbnails, I think. Wildcard folder formats should make that easy if the folders are well organised.

Sir, Sorry to say that I have zero knowledge in scripting. I see how powerful scripting is after using Fastkeys, and now DOpus.
I guess it's in the global filters, that you are suggesting to play around with. I have added .ico to the Image format in file types. But now, it works only if the folder.ico is unhidden. I just wanted to display all my personalised folders in the preferred format. Is it possible too?

The easiest thing to do is to simply set up folder formats for the folders you want to look different.

You can either save one format for each individual path, or create a wildcard format which matches multiple paths (if that makes sense for them; hard to say without knowing what they are, how many folders we're talking about, and how they're arranged).

This would be better as a separate thread.

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Go to Preferences > Folder Behavior and tick "Enable Folder Content Type detection"

You can tweak the threshold for when these will trigger under Preferences > Folder Formats > Content type formats > Double click the format > Options.

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Thanks for pointing this out. But this tweak actually reverses what I want.