I don’t really understand what’s happened, but with the latest Windows 10 update, suddenly I don’t see letters on my various drives and my photo icons in folder view are missing previews of the images themselves. Really frustrating! How can I restore my regular folder view on my PC?
Turns out that File Explorer in Windows 10 has about a zillion different options you can tweak and adjust. From having the status bar show you a bit about the overall folder you’re viewing to various buttons, check boxes, and other features, there’s quite a bit to change with the preferences and settings of File Explorer. It’s odd that they would have switched during an update, however, so I would encourage you to also run a deep malware check to ensure nothing else is going on.
Fortunately, if you can handle the old-school Windows 3.1-style interface, there are a lot of different changes you can make to your File Explorer / folder browsing experience, including adding back those drive letters and photo and image previews on the file icons. To start the fix, simply go to any folder, directory or device that exhibits the problem. I’ve recreated your situation so here are two examples of the problem. First up, a folder without image file previews:
The PDFs aren’t going to ever look different, but not only should those four image files have previews on their icons, but with the right settings, subfolders end up with tiny previews shown within the folder icon too, and you can see above that they’re all absent.
Look a bit closer and you’ll also notice that there’s no status bar along the bottom of the File Explorer view: Usually it shows how many files and subfolders are in this particular folder, which can be quite helpful. We’ll fix that long the way too.
Here’s what your drives look like when those useful drive letters (C:, D:, E:, etc) are missing:
A bit disconcerting if you’re used to having those reassuring letters that you’ve had forever!
To fix things up, click or tap on “View” along the top of one of these Win10 File Explorer windows. It’ll bring up a ribbon:
You can see that changing icon size, showing hidden items, even changing sort order is pretty easy. But what about all these other settings?
They’re all hidden in the “Options” window. Tap or click on “Options” on the right to bring up this smaller window:
These general behaviors can be worth changing just to see if different behaviors will match your preferred usage, but for what we’re doing, you need to tap/click on the “View” tab. Now you’ll get a long list of configuration and preference check boxes:
All of the changes are in the Advanced settings list of checkbox options. And it can be small and trick to read, so if it’s too small, now’s a good time to consider learning about the Magnifier screen zoom feature. Here’s a Microsoft tutorial: Get Started with Magnifier. Either way, here’s what you want to find and uncheck:
Confusingly, the preview is known as a “thumbnail” so if you have “Always show icons, never thumbnails” you’ll end up not having those previews you want. Uncheck this to fix the problem. If it were me, I’d reverse the logic and have this checked if you do want thumbnails, but…
This logic makes more sense: Check this option to “Show drive letters” in File Explorer.
One more:
Add back that status bar on every File Explorer window with “Show status bar“. Easily done, and darn useful.
Now our windows suddenly look wayyyyy better. (well, make sure you click “Apply” before you close the options window!)
Sure I’d know that the local drive is C: and the DVD drive is D: but it’s good to see that confirmation so I can use drive letter shortcuts with confidence. The folder with subfolders and images now looks way better too:
All fixed up and notice also in both of the last two screen shots that the Status bar is back too, showing 10 items in the first and 96 items in the second image. Useful. But really it’s those image previews that are the win, as well as the folder preview icons showing the type of info in those subfolders. Well fixed. Done.
Pro Tip: I’ve written hundreds of windows 10 help pages and encourage you to check ’em out while you’re on the site. Thanks!