thumbnails?

Last night, in the course of getting our old scanner to work with
Ubuntu, I discovered a hidden file entitled "thumbnails" It had in it a
tiny copy of every picture I'd ever had on my machine, it seems.

What is the purpose of these? If I delete most of them, will it matter
at all, seeing as how I've deleted them from everywhere else on the machine?

JimW
Received on Thu Mar 22 23:11:10 2007