Help Please. Slow to draw thumbnails.

This problem is driving me crazy. I've had the G1 for several months now, and my only complaint is that it draws thumbnails of digital photos VERY slowly. It takes up to 20 seconds to draw the thumbnails for 30 5MP digital photos. Why!? It's got 512MB of video card memory!

Any help would be appreciated. It otherwise runs fine and plays the latest games fine. It's just with digital photo thumbnails. Thanks.

 

Are the thumbnails stored locally on your hard disk or are they being accessed remotely?

A video card will have little to nothing to do with speed of thumbnail-rendering.

How fast is your hard disk?

I don't think that what you're describing is a unreasonable situation ... it takes a while for the computer to access, read, draw and then resize the photos

 

My A8Jp renders thumbnails pretty quickly (running WinXP MCE 2005). If your files are large (how many MB?), they could take some time, but I can open a file of 53 photos of different sizes (most of them 4 and 5 MB) pretty quickly (like 10 seconds).

 

The pics are on my main hard drive. And I've never had this problem with my desktop. A friend of mine had a laptop that used to be just as slow when accessing digital photos, but he upgraded to 1GB of RAM and no longer has that problem. I'm maxed out at 2GB of RAM, got this blazing video card, and am running the latest XP MCE. The pics are 2MB a piece.

Attached is a picture of the screen consisting of all jpegs. It took over 60 seconds for that to load and about 50% of the thumbnails do not show until I move the cursor over them. While it is in the process of drawing, I cannot left or right click on the folder and it is very slow to even X out of the folder. When it gets to the point shown in the picture I can right click and hit refresh and everything will be drawn normally. This cannot be normal. Thanks for the input.

 

If you have Windows set to cache thumbnails, the thumbnail databases could have become corrupted. No real reason why, it just sometimes happens. To repair:

1. Click Start | Search. In the top search bar, type "thumbs.db" (without quotes)
2. In the "Look in" bar, select only the C: drive if that's where all your pictures and movies are.
3. Click "More advanced options" and tick "search hidden files and folders"
and also tick "Search sub-folders".
4. Now click "Search".
5. When search is complete, highlight all the thumbs.db files and delete them.
6. Reboot and Windows will build new thumbs.db files in each folder when you select thumbnail view.

Another alternative would be to use a different picture viewer (instead of Windows native viewer) such as Faststoneor Irfanview.

 

Thanks sanpabloguy. I tried that with no improvement. Will having Windows use Irfanview or another program affect how fast it will render thumbnails though?

 

I think so. You can try using something like Google Picassa or Irfanview to manage your photos.

 

I've been using ACDsee for years now, same version 2.4. I still haven't come across a faster viewer.

 

Yeah me too. I was suggesting the other simply because they're free.

I've been reading that google picassa is better. I installed it but I haven't used it yet. We'll see.

 

Thanks for all the input. I noticed that when I organize my pics under "list" it would show icons for Adobe Photoshop even though I've got it set to render with the Windows program. I uninstalled Photoshop and now the thumbnails render almost immediately. Woohooo!