A thumbnail view is also commonly seen as a miniature picture that represents a larger graphic. The Microsoft Windows Operating System® generates thumbnails of larger graphic files and displays them to the user in the explorer window. Starting with Windows ME, the user could select View > Thumbnails from the drop down menu. This allowed the user to view thumbnails of the graphics in that folder instead of the details or icons normally viewed. When the user accesses this view a hidden file in created by the operating system in the folder where the graphic files are stored. These operating system created files are not visible to the common user. This system file is called a thumbs.db and is actually a database of the miniature images that exist in the folder from which they are initiated. An interesting aspect of the thumbs.db files is that when a graphic is viewed and an entry made for it in the database, it is maintained indefinitely by the operating system. If the graphic file is deleted, the image will remain unless the thumbs.db file or the entire folder is deleted.