[Fix] Folder Thumbnails Appear With White Border in Windows 10

When you set a folder picture via the Customize tab in folder properties or by editing the Desktop.ini file manually, the folder thumbnail may show up with white border in Windows 10, as in the image below.

folder thumbnails with white border
Folder thumbnail behavior in Windows 10.

When the same folder picture is used in Windows 8 or earlier, the folder thumbnail would show up stretched, like this:

folder thumbnails with white border
Folder thumbnail behavior in Windows 8 and earlier

From what I’ve seen, most people seem to like the latter style (which looks neat) than the one with white border.

White Border Shown Only for Square images

folder thumbnails with white border

This is due to a UI change in Windows 10 that you may not like. After playing with different settings, I found that this only happens for perfectly square images (like 200×200, 250×250 etc.)

Non-square images appear stretched as in pre-Windows 10 style, and square ones are scaled down visually and shown with border, as compared in the following screenshot.



folder thumbnails with white border

Remove White Border in Folder Thumbnails

To show the stretched folder picture in thumbnail view as in figure 1 above, all I had to do was edit the hidden file named folder.jpg using Paint, and crop it (200×199 or something, from 200×200) so that it’s not a square image.

folder thumbnails with white border

However, before modifying folder.jpg, you may need to remove the System, Hidden and Read-Only attributes for the file. To do so, open a Command Prompt window and type:

cd /d <folderpath>
attrib -s -h -r folder.jpg

Edit folder.jpg using Paint or any image editor of your choice and crop it. You may need to refresh or rebuild the thumbnail cache after saving the file.


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Ramesh Srinivasan is passionate about Microsoft technologies and he has been a consecutive ten-time recipient of the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional award in the Windows Shell/Desktop Experience category, from 2003 to 2012. He loves to troubleshoot and write about Windows. Ramesh founded Winhelponline.com in 2005.

4 thoughts on “[Fix] Folder Thumbnails Appear With White Border in Windows 10”

  1. Cheers for trying Ramesh but it would be better if Microsoft got their finger out and updated Windows 10 to fix this as your fix would be a lot of hassle to a lot of people, like me, who have a lot of music folders.

    Reply

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