[Matt3o12_]

Assuming you’re running a smb server, you could just veto the files. Windows isn’t much better since it likes to create thumbs.db almost everywhere too (which I also veto, but vetoing them can increase the load and bandwidth requirements and your server and clients)

[Avery3R]

thumbs.db hasn't been a thing since XP... Vista+ generates thumbcache_xxx.db within the user's temp folder.

[alt227]

Yeah Vetoing is an option, although without testing I do not know how the mac clients would react on saving a file and its metadata was not allowed. Would the mac throw an error?

EDIT: I have had people say this to me before about windows and thumbs.db. But I personally have not seen this in the wild. Maybe its what old versions of windows did and people are still remembering this?

[Matt3o12_]

I haven’t seen any errors and macOS seems to handle it greacefully. You can also disable it on macOS clients for network servers individually but that seems to be a loosing battle (even if you control all clients). They are finder settings after all

https://serverfault.com/a/5567

Thumbs.db files are created on my windows 11 pc at least. They’re only created for files that have metadata that requires reading those files. Explorer likes to display the metadata (sometimes) for some folders that have a lot of media in it (pictures, music, videos, etc). If the thumbs.db file is missing, windows will partially read every media file on the server to show thumbnails, that obviously creates unnecessary load but it’s really a trade off that might not make sense for most.