If you are a Google Chrome user you are familiar with the new tab page and one if it’s most prominent feature – thumbnails of the eight most visited web pages. It provides some nice visual flair to an otherwise clean and cut browser all while providing some nice functionality. Odds are, you’ve opened a new tab to visit one of those eight sites anyways right?

The thumbnails are generated and updated automatically but the frequency tends to be random, or at the very least not often enough. Furthermore, sometimes a bad or wrong thumbnail can be captured. For example, visiting a website that is temporarily offline can result in a blank thumbnail. Unfortunately, Chrome provides no user interface to address this problem situation, but that doesn’t mean you are stuck until the next refresh.

Fixing the thumbnails first involves closing Chrome and navigating to the Chrome User Data Folder. From the Run dialog execute: %LOCALAPPDATA%\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\

From the resulting Explorer window scroll-down and find the file titled Thumbnails – you might be surprised at the size of it! Delete it as this is the file that contains all your cached thumbnail images, not just from the eight most visited sites.

Open Chrome again and notice that the thumbnails on the new tab page are now generic. To have Chrome generate a new thumbnail simply visit each of the sites and the Thumbnails file contents will get repopulated.