Make music folders display album cover art as thumbnails.

One of XP's coolest new features is its album thumbnail generator. Let's say you just finished ripping Britney Spear's new album and you want the art from her new album to be displayed on the folder where all the MP3/WMAs are stored. That's not a problem in XP.

All you need to do is download her new album cover from CDNow.com or Amazon.com. Try finding an image with a size about 200x200 pixels.

After you locate an image on the Internet, just follow these directions:

  1. Right-click the image and choose "Save Picture As..." to bring up the Save Picture dialog box.
  2. Name the image as "folder.jpg" (without quotes) and place it inside the same folder along with all the MP3 or WMAs from her new album.
  3. Click Save to place the image on your hard drive.


Now, bring up Windows Explorer and navigate to where your music folder is stored. Be sure to change your folder view to Thumbnails. To do this, just click View in the Windows Explorer file menu and select Thumbnails. XP will then automatically scale folder.jpg and display it as a folder thumbnail.