Change Thumbnail Preview Border in Windows 7 or Vista Explorer

If you are not aware, when you select thumbnails in Windows 7 or Windows Vista, you can change borders too. Different type of borders can be applied to thumbnails like

1. No border
2. Straight border
3. Photo border
4. Shadow border

You can make the changes and apply them by making changes in the registry editor. Here are the steps to change thumbnail border in Windows 7. By default, the thumbnail previews in Windows 7 or Vista explorer.exe appear as Miniature Photographs. You can, if you wish, tweak the registry to make them appear like a video film cutting along with the ‘sprocket-holed’ perforated borders.

Change Border of Thumbnail Preview

To do so, type ‘Run’ in the Start menu search bar. Then, in the ‘Run’ dialog box type ‘regedit’ and hit enter. Next, open regedit and navigate to the following key:

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\SystemFileAssociations\image

In the right panel, right-click on Treatment and select Modify. Change the hexadecimal value of this to 3, from its default 2.

Reboot.

Open any explorer window where you store your images and ensure that the thumbnail view is selected. You will see the change.

Changing the value to 0 or 1 instead does cause some minor changes to the thumbnail previews, too.

That’s it!

Share on Google Plus