SharePoint picture library not generating thumbnail and websize images

I recently came across a problem in a customer's site where the thumbnail and websize version of an image was not being generated. Typically when you upload an image to a picture library, a thumbnail and a websize version of that image are generated by SharePoint and saved into the /_t/ and /_w/ subfolders. For example, if upload an image to /Shared Pictures/image.jpg, then SharePoint also automatically generates /Shared Pictures/_t/image_jpg.jpg and /Shared Pictures/_w/image_jpg.jpg

For some reason, this was not happening. When you view the picture library with the default view, all the pictures were showing a blank image (since they use the thumbnail version).

Reaching out to Microsoft Support, it turns out that for these libraries, the parent SPWeb had the ParserEnabled property set to false.

The MSDN description of the SPWeb.ParserEnabled Property is quite useless.

Fortunately, I found a blog discussing this: http://neels-indites.blogspot.ca/2012/06/sharepoint-spweb-property-parserenabled.html. According to this blog, having ParserEnabled=false will cause the following:

• Cannot search in document library using Office document properties
• When you upload an image file, the thumbnail and websize images will not be generated
• When you save a list template, you will not see it in the list template gallery.