How to Add a Thumbnail View in SharePoint Online Document Library?

In SharePoint online document library, thumbnail view helps to get the document snapshot without actually opening the documents. In this SharePoint online tutorial, I will explain how to add a thumbnail view in SharePoint online document library.

To add a thumbnail in the document library, we need to provide the column name as “Thumbnail” only if we provide the other name, what happens? Let us see this in detail in this tutorial.

Note:

By default, thumbnail preview is not available in a SharePoint document library.

SharePoint Online Document Library thumbnail column generates image previews for

• PDF
• PowerPoint
• Word
• mp4, and many more…

Word, PowerPoint, PDF, Emails (.msg), Video (.mp4), and other image file formats. 

The above screenshot represents the SharePoint document library thumbnail view.

Let us see how to achieve this.

Add Thumbnail View to SharePoint Online Document Library

Here, we will see how to add a thumbnail view to SharePoint Online document library. Follow the steps to add a thumbnail view to the SharePoint Online document library.

• Open a SharePoint Online Document Library home page -> Click on +Add column -> Select Image data type-> Click on Next.

• In this Create a column window, provide a column name as Thumbnail -> Click on Save.

• Now, we can see thumbnails are populated for documents and automatically add the snapshot (preview) of the first page of each file.

This is how we can add a SharePoint Online document library thumbnail view.

Now, let us provide a column name differently rather than a Thumbnail as a column name. Then we will see if thumbnails will be populated or what? or any snapshots of the first page of each file will be added or not?

• In the SharePoint document library page -> Click on +Add column -> Select Image data type-> Click on Next.
• In this Create a column window, provide a column name as Thumbnail Image [Any random name]-> Click on Save.

• Now in the SharePoint document library, we can see that snapshots of the first page of each file will not be added.

Here is a complete video tutorial in case you want to see it.

Conclusion

From this SharePoint Online tutorial, we discussed the SharePoint document library thumbnail view, which helps to get the document snapshot of the first page of each file.

Moreover, I have explained to you how to add a thumbnail view in the SharePoint document library and also shown you by providing a random name to the column name rather than a Thumbnail what happens?

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