Thumbnails

Thumbnails are reduced-size versions of pictures, serving the same role for images as a normal text index does for words.

Windows

See Thumbs.db.

Windows Vista

Thumbs.db no longer exists in Vista. This data has been moved to \Users\\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer

Windows Vista will save thumbnails for files on a mounted TrueCrypt volume.

KDE & GNOME

KDE and GNOME are popular desktop environments for Linux and UNIX platforms. They are storing thumbnails in ~/.thumbnails.

Example thumbnail in GNOME:

$ hachoir-metadata .thumbnails/normal/0d97afdc637ac86d75d13e72172dc77c.png
Metadata:
- Image width: 128 pixels
- Image height: 122 pixels
- Bits/pixel: 24
- Pixel format: RGB
- Compression rate: 1.6x
- Compression: deflate
- Producer: GNOME::ThumbnailFactory
- Comment: Thumb::Image::Width=779
- Comment: Thumb::Image::Height=744
- Comment: Thumb::URI=file:///media/truecrypt1/123.jpg
- Comment: Thumb::MTime=1216153400
- MIME type: image/png
- Endian: Big endian

GNOME will save thumbnails for files on mounted encrypted filesystems.