Cleaning the memory of a smartphone unequivocally indicates that hundreds of megabytes and even gigabytes are occupied by the content of thumbnail files with a Thumbdata format. In this article, we will teach you what is the Thumbdata file and how to remove it from .
What is Thumbdata?
A Thumbdata file is a cache format created by the application “Gallery” of some Android devices. This contains indexed property information about each thumbnail image displayed in the Photo Gallery. He Caching this information helps the app load thumbnails faster.
On the other hand, Thumbdata files are hidden files that are stored in folders “.THUMBNAILS” hidden from Android devices. As such, you can access a Thumbdata file on your device only if you have access to hidden files.
Additionally, file extensions typically end with a number followed by one or two dashes and an additional long string of numbers. For example, a Thumbdata file might be called “.THUMBDATA3—1967290299”.
Thumbnail data file feature on phone
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Any file manager enter a catalog with photos and images, looks for small sketches as small copies of large images to show them to the user and thus facilitate the search for the desired photos. Some administrators, in the absence of such sketches, can create them themselves, but page loading slows down greatly.
Therefore, the Android operating system create these thumbnails automatically. And instead of putting them in separate files (they would have to create as many as there are photos in the DCIM folder), it adds them to a single file called “.thumbnails” with a number at the end, usually 3 or 5, and with a tail of 12 digits as I showed you before.
And it not only adds, but caches, that is, it creates a special index by which the search for a specific thumbnail of a photo is done very quicklyin a fraction of a second, although the Thumbdata file itself can be several gigabytes in size and contain thousands of thumbnails.
On the other hand, you already know what it means to have thumbnail data on an Android phone. But this indexing also has a major drawback. Since the file is automatically attached when new photos appear, its size is constantly increasing. But if you delete some photos, this will not affect the size of the Thumbdata file.
That is to say, will contain the sketch itself and a link to non-existent photos. Additionally, you can delete or transfer all photos to another media (flash drive, external drive or cloud), but the index file will still take up a decent portion of scarce memory.
Therefore, if this is not critical for phones with (64 or 128 gigabytes) of internal memory, then owners of configurations of (2, 16, 1, 8 GB) will be completely unacceptable.
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How to view the properties of the Thumbdata file on Android
If you want to see the size of the Thumbdata file in the “File Manager”choosing to show instead of the “list” of thumbnails, you will not be able to do this, since this folder is of hidden type.
Which, the solution is to select the option to show hidden files in the file manager settings or install the application “ES Explorer” either “Total Commander”. From there you will have control over these.
Thumbdata file can be deleted
The presence of Thumbdata makes it much easier from the gallery. But for those who are constantly dedicated only to that and who clear memory space due to its lack. The answer for this will be positive.
Therefore, the absence of the Thumbdata file on the smartphone will not affect its performance in any way, since every time the user enters the gallerythe operating system checks for its presence and recreates it if it is absent.
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This will take some time, but if you clean the folder thoroughly, getting rid of old and unnecessary photos and images, the size of the folder in question will decrease noticeably. That is, this operation makes sense, despite the apparent effort required.
However, over time it will grow back as new photos appear, so I recommend deleting the index file regularly, especially on phones with low memory.
On the other hand, before examining the issue of opening the Thumbdata file for deletion, keep in mind that such index files are also available on a computer running the Windows 10 operating system, but they are called differently than in this case. “Thumbs.db” and are generated in all directories where graphic files are available.
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How to remove thumbnails from Thumbdata
Many people know that in Windows for example, when there is a lack of RAM, the problem is solved using a paging file. On smartphones, this is not possible and the free internal memory itself may not be available.
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If there is a shortage of memory, installing a new application will not work, and many operations that require writing to memory will not work either. Meanwhile he smartphone can noticeably slow down.
It turns out that Thumbdata files, on the one hand, speed up the display of gallery thumbnails and, on the other hand, slow down the phone. So deleting them will solve the problem of lack of memory, even if it is temporarily.
Therefore, there are several ways to get rid of index files using an existing file manager, with a computer or with special applications that clean the phone’s memory from garbage. Below I will teach you the methods to follow to temporarily delete Thumbdata file.
1. Use the android file manager
· Download a file manager
You can use almost any, for example: ES Explorer, Total Commander or Solid Explorer Classic. The main condition is that you must have the option to show hidden files enabled (you can do it in the phone settings, but it is better directly in the explorer).
· Find the file in the administrator
The Thumbdata folder, as a rule, is located in the storage directory “/…/DCIM” (instead of three dots, it can be, for example: emulated /0, but the driver will get there by itself). If it is a is found in “storage/sdcard0”.
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· Delete Thumbdata folder from storage
In the file manager, go to the DCIM directory and you will see several folders here, among which is the Thumbdata file. You can do different things. You can open the folder and delete the files that start with it extension.
On the other hand, you can skip and delete the entire folder along with the contents, i.e. the index file and thumbnails. In any case, this is an absolutely safe operation, since the photos themselves are in a different folder, and the contents of the deleted folder will be restored as soon as you enter the gallery.
2. delete the file Thumbdata with a Windows Explorer
If you are not used to working with a file manager on a smartphone, but you can work perfectly with the file explorer on a computer, then you just need your smartphone to a PC with a USB cable.
The principle itself will remain the same. But Windows will be the one to search, so you can quickly find “.thumbnails” files in other locations as well.
3. Use a specialized application
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The choice for this is enormous. You can, for example, use the Android version of the popular application “CCleaner” selecting the tab “Quick clean” on the taskbar. As a result, a list of file types and folders themselves, which the program considered possible to delete, will be displayed.
In it, search “Miniatures”mark it and touch “Finish cleaning”. You can also clear memory of other files if you know you don’t need them.
On the other hand, the application “Unseen Gallery” you can find all JPEG images. You just start it by touching the button “Start” and wait for the application to sort all the found images into folders.
Then, to finish, look for the Thumbdata directory, select all the files, touch the trash icon. Unseen Gallery can also be used as a viewer, search for photos and thumbnails by date or size.
Otherwise, the application “Delete thumbnails in DCIM”as its name implies, was originally designed for a single function and is of index. You just need to tap the yellow button and wait for the Thumbdata file to be deleted.
Conclusion
As you can see, your smartphone has many hidden reserves to free up memory and with this article you already know how to deal with the Thumbdata file. The application of the described methods does not require special knowledge.
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