large picture folders and thumbnails

[Guest]

In XP windows kept a thumbs.db in the folder that ensured thumbnails were
available quite quickly even with many pictures on an external USB hard
drive. With Vista now no such file exists and a large folder opened with many
hundreds of pictures has a real problem giving thumbnails for much beyond the
first pageful in Windows Explorer. As I am scanning my archive of 14,000
slides this has become a real problem that did not exist with XP. Is there
anyway I can improve this situation? Ideally the Xp functionality in Vista
would be the desired solution or is just another thing the Microsoft left out
of Vista? Any thoughts?
Thanks,
Jaistar

 

[Josh Phillips]

A quick way to speed this up would be to display the icon rather than the
thumbnail. Start | Contorl Panel | Folder Options | View

Then Check "Always show icons, Never thumbnails.

josh
http://windowsconnected.com

 

[Guest]

Thanks Josh,
It would indeed but I was looking to speed up the thumnail production as I
need these to find suject areas in the archive where the slides have serial
names like 287_36. This all worked fine on XP but unless I can get thumbnails
working I am going to have to waste a load of time making an index of 14,000
images.

 

[DP]

Make sure you're not wiping out stored thumbnails when using Disk Cleanup,
if in fact you use that.
If you use it, scroll down the list of files it can delete and you'll see
that stored thumbnails is something that might be checked. You should
uncheck it.

If you use some other disk-cleaning software, make sure it doesn't delete
stored thumbnails.

 

[Guest]

Thanks DP,
After first encountering the problem I noted the disk cleanup process wanted
to delete stored thumbnails and guessed that this may well have some bearing
on the problem. It also wanted - and had done - the hibernation file cleaner
and lost me the ability to hibernate. Grrr. reinstall time again and a steep
Vista learning curve.
As a test I had connected an 80GB USB2 disk with around 3,000 big pictures
of approx 10Mb each. I laboriously scrolled down this as explorer made
thumbnails eventually completing them all. The trouble is these thumbnails
are not persistent if the drive is disconnected then reconnected later. Would
it be the case that if I could find permanent UBS ports for these external
drives (320Gb &400Gb) and explorer could be persuaded to make thumbnails
which is not exactly an automatic process that I could have persistent
thumbnails provided that they were not "cleaned" ? If this is the case I
really need a way to make explorer get on and finish making a large number of
thumbnails automatically. Any suggestions there?
Jaistar.

 

[Cal Bear '66]

I've noticed this problem too, In folders with large numbers of video or
graphics files, the green bar across the top takes forever to rebuild the icons
every time I open the folder. Internal drives and external USB and Fire wire
drives also exhibit the same behavior.

 

[Adam Albright]

I've noticed this problem too, In folders with large numbers of video or
graphics files, the green bar across the top takes forever to rebuild the icons
every time I open the folder. Internal drives and external USB and Fire wire
drives also exhibit the same behavior.

Vista is so dumb it reindexes for no good reason, often at the expense
of the end user's time. You would think that since Vista tips the
scale at 8GB for the average install that the microsoft engineers
would have been smart enough to use better sorting algorithms.