It's not exactly the same thing, but Windows used to have a thumb.db to store, well, thumbnails, in each folder that has thumbnail-able files.

I hated it, most of people hated it. MS finally got rid of it (in Vista or 7) and store thumbnails in a centralized place.

However, I now start to miss it.

I store lots of large image files (think 1200 dpi PNG scans) on my computer, and it took Windows years to create thumbnail for them, while locking the entire hard disk (and sometimes the whole explorer.exe) in the meantime. This process, while obviously is much slower on spinning HDD, it surprisingly isn't really that fast on NVME SSD, either.

This would be fine if it's a one-time process, but unfortunately the aforementioned centralized thumbnail cache either have an expiration time, or have a size limit (or both), so the reality is if I didn't visit a folder for awhile, its thumbnails are all gone, so they have to be generated again, make the explorer unresponsive for some time again.

I have been annoyed by this for long time but I don't have any solution. The best workaround is to only view such folders in list/detail mode, and rely on 3rd party image manager (I use XnView) to show the preview/thumbnail -- which has a much faster thumbnailing speed and more robust thumbnail cache management.