Thumbnail storage and memory

Every plugin’s thumbnail — auto-captured or your own — lives in one folder alongside your other VFxM data, separate from REAPER’s own files.

Where they’re kept

Plugin Manager → Thumbnail Scanner shows the exact path for your machine at the top of the section and lets you point it somewhere else. Before 1.2.3 it lived in Settings → Files.

Moving the folder doesn’t lose anything already captured — VFxM reads from wherever the path points.

Two limits, so a large library doesn’t cost more than it should

On disk: new captures are written at a capped resolution. A thumbnail is never shown larger than a few dozen pixels outside the Preview panel, so capturing and storing it at full plugin-window size never bought you anything — this just stops paying for detail nothing displays.

In memory: this is the one that matters more. Thumbnails are loaded onto the GPU as textures while VFxM is open, and that cache used to have no ceiling — every thumbnail you’d viewed this session stayed resident at full resolution for as long as REAPER ran, whether or not anything was still showing it. A library with a couple thousand plugins could push that cache past 1.8GB of video memory. VFxM now caps it at 256MB with automatic eviction of whatever hasn’t been shown recently — over 7x smaller, on the same GPU REAPER uses to draw its own interface.

What this means for you

Nothing to do. Both caps apply automatically from the moment you install — there’s no setting to turn on and nothing to rescan. Existing thumbnails keep working exactly as before; they’re simply held more efficiently in memory while VFxM is open. Any thumbnail captured from here on is written to disk at the smaller size automatically.

If you want to see the difference on a library you already have, rescan your thumbnails — recapturing replaces the old file with one at the new, smaller size. Doing this isn’t necessary; it only matters if disk space is tight enough to be worth it.