Customize Windows 7 & 8 Taskbar Preview with Taskbar Thumbnail Tuner

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Thumbnail previews in the Windows taskbar are incredibly useful, but if you feel they are not showing up as you want, then here’s a free, portable tool called Taskbar Thumbnail Tuner which will help you make your taskbar thumbnail preview just like you want them on Windows 7 and Windows 8.

How to Use Taskbar Thumbnail Tuner
After downloading the software and running, you will see a neatly laid out tabbed interface as below:

Taskbar Thumbnail Tuner

In the first tab, you can adjust most of the general settings such as thumbnail size, thumbnail delay, spacing between two thumbnails, as well as some other options that are inaccessible through default Windows settings. From here you can also disable the preview by checking the corresponding checkbox. In Margin tab, you can adjust the preview margins.

Simply drag the slider or manually enter a custom value to tweak each setting.

Available options include:

  • Change thumbnail size
  • Change number of grouped application windows thumbnails
  • Change horizontal and vertical spacing between thumbnails
  • Change thumbnail delay
  • Change application’s caption position
  • Disable taskbar thumbnails
  • Adjust top, bottom, right, and left margins

Once you are happy with the settings, hit “Apply” button to enable the changes. Windows Explorer will be restarted.

Restore to Default Windows Settings

To restore taskbar thumbnail back to default Windows settings, simply run the program, and click on the “Defaults” button. Once again Explorer will restart and the taskbar will be back to how it used to be.

Demo Video

Here’s a video showing different functionalities of this tool:

Taskbar Thumbnail Tuner is available for both Windows 7 and Windows 8. For Windows 8, use the program inside the “Win8Native” folder in the downloaded ZIP file. It’s compiled with .NET 4.5 for the OS.

Download: Taskbar Thumbnail Tuner