Block previews on Design center

[morganism3]

Hello all,

My company recently went through and changed all the custom-made blocks in their library. When we use designcenter to insert a block into a dwg, it works just fine. HOWEVER, the image on designcenter (the little thumbnail on the right column of designcenter that shows a preview of the block) still shows the old blocks. We cannot figure out how to update the preview. Any thoughts?

[Alfred.NESWADBA · Accepted solution]

Hi,

where are the blocks stored? If they are all in one drawing then open this drawing, start command _BLOCKICON (and option *), save the drawing and close it.

After that (maybe after a restart of AutoCAD) you should see the new icons in the design center.

If the block-library consists of seperated drawings (each block a single dwg) then you have to open it, zoom extents, and close with save.

A tool could help here to make that not file-by-file manually.

- alfred -

[morganism3]

Awesome, works great. 🙂

Sincerely,

Morgan Grace Hart
Design Drafter
Total Safety
Direct: (337) 839-6332
Office: (337) 837-1888

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[StephenThomasGrace]

Just went through this issue and did not find the solution in any post, so I am posting one!

Back in AutoCAD 2000, the design center created cdc files in the folders where the block libraries were.

This saved each block's image preview. If you changed the block content but not its name the preview was not updated.

You had to delete the cdc file and then it would then be recreated and the preview images updated!

Well, fast forward to AutoCAD 2018 (and at least 2012+ too). The whole scenario above still holds true except for the location of the cdc files.

They are now located at:

C:\Users\<<UserName>>\AppData\Local\Temp

It will be <<FolderName>>.cdc

Delete it and when you go back to the design center and do the refresh, the new block content will appear.

This explains a few other posts where renaming the folder allows the images to update, but when you name it back, the old images reappeared.

Images were cached! The cdc file just keeps appending... never deleting.

Hope this helps other frustrated people.