Delete image thumbnails with PowerShell
Windows Explorer stores image thumbnails in hidden files called
Thumbs.db
. Suppose you want to clean a large directory tree
to keep just the actual image files. That is, you want to delete the
Thumbs.db
files. But there might be even more (possibly
hidden) files or directories you don’t need, like .DS_Store
or .picasa.ini
files, depending on the image management
software used. So prior to just deleting all hidden files, you should do
some analysis.
Here are some useful PowerShell commands (where gci
is
an alias for the Get-ChildItem
commandlet).
Show all hidden files in the C:\images
directory:
PS> gci C:\images -recurse -hidden
For a quick overview, show only the file names:
PS> gci C:\images -recurse -hidden | select name
Show all hidden files in the C:\images
directory that
are not named Thumbs.db
:
PS> gci C:\images -recurse -hidden | where name -ne 'Thumbs.db'
Delete all hidden files in the C:\images
directory:
PS> gci C:\images -recurse -hidden | rm -force
Delete only the Thumbs.db
files:
PS> gci C:\images -recurse -hidden -file -filter 'Thumbs.db' | rm -force