disable windows 10 file explorer thumbnails for .max files

[grue1970]

how do i disable thumbnails for .max scenes in windows 10 file explorer?

the inverse of these instructions: https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/3ds-max/troubleshooting/caas/sfdcarticles/sfdcarticles/How-to...

thanks!

[Diffus3d]

I'm not totally sure on your direct ask @grue1970 , but maybe this link can help.  Seems to me that it's the .dll itself which gives windows the ability to create the thumbs, so simply renaming it to .bak or whatever should stop it from working in Windows.  You might have to search to make sure there aren't multiples of the dll somewhere in a windows system folder.  Hopefully this doesn't cause max to throw an error when starting, if it does maybe create a blank file and simply name it after this .dll so max sees it but it does nothing.  (Maybe you've already tried these things.)  

That being said win10 remembers your view settings per folder so you can simply set the folder to view 'details' and that should do it for every time you access that folder.  Not sure if that propagates to subfolders but it may.  

Is your problem the slow creation of thumbnails?  

Best Regards,

[grue1970]

yeah i thought it might be more of a windows thing.  just renaming it wouldn't work as it's already registered.  i can search for command in windows 10 to un-register a dll and that'll probably do it..

[grue1970 · Accepted solution]

yep here's what i did:  i ran the command to unregister that maxthumbnail dll.  i got an error, but it appeared to work.  not at first though. i had to go in and clear all windows 10 thumnail cache.  then i rebooted machine just to make sure. my max files on my desktop all had the old dos white window looking icon.  then all i had to do was right-click > open with > max 2022 and now all my .max files show the standard 3dsmax icon instead of a thumbnail.

[Diffus3d]

Nice!  Thanks for posting your solution @grue1970 , that might help someone in the future.  I'm going to go ahead and mark it as the solution, thanks again!

Best Regards,

[ilgianfi]

09:20
Hi, I have the same problem, I’d like to make the preview image of the scene disappear. Could you kindly explain step by step how you did it? I tried unregistering maxthumbnailshellexr.dll, but I couldn’t do it. I’m using Windows 11. Thanks, because this is very annoying. I managed to fix it years ago, but now I don’t remember what I did. Many thanks!!!