Thumbnail aggravation

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JohnFredC
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Thumbnail aggravation

Post by *JohnFredC »

So: using TC, I enter a image folder that has some images (>25, say) AND many sub-folders with images, each with very many images. After a minute or so TC finally renders all of the file and folder thumbs and the panel becomes useful for my purpose.

Then I click another tab in the TC same panel for a quick look at another (non-thumb) folder. Upon returning to the original (thumbs) panel guess what? TC wipes the existing thumbs and re-renders them from scratch (the drive light on the image drive flickers frantically), so I have to wait yet again for the thumbs to rebuild. This behavior is so unproductive as make the TC thumbnail view in heavily populated image folders essentially useless for any productive interaction, an incredible aggravation and inconvenience for me.

The images are on an entirely separate drive from the TC cache. I successfully compact the thumbnail database regularly.

Isn't the thumb caching supposed to display the thumbs quickly, without having to access the files themselves?

Or maybe I don't understand how the caching is supposed to work?

For instance:
  • -Are folder thumbs cached?
    -Are all rendering methods cached?
    -Do all methods render, whether a previous method has already rendered?
    -Is there a way to instruct TC what order to render thumbs in (which method first, which files first?)
    -How do I tell TC to render all thumbs whether I have scrolled to them or not? It appears to wait until I scroll the panel, under any and all conditions.
    -Why does TC always re-render previously rendered thumbs when I switch back to a thumbed tab?
This is a long time problem in TC for me and I am just about at the end of my patience with it.

Here is my thumbs setup. Any advice to speed up TC's display of thumbs would be greatly appreciated!
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HolgerK
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Post by *HolgerK »

Maybe
"Use Explorer method (Ole2) for: *.* | *.htm *.html *. "
can speed up the redraw, by excluding the folder thumbnails for all folder without any extension " *. "?

Regards,
Holger

Edit: Ahrg this doesen't work :?
Only unchecking "Use Explorer method" disables the folder thumbs.
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JohnFredC
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Post by *JohnFredC »

But I don't want to disable folder thumbs... they are very helpful!
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Clo
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Tabs ? INI entries ?

Post by *Clo »

2JohnFredC

:) Hello John !

• In a similar case, here I get bearable delays… I use 4-in-1 thumbnails for the folders.
So, did you try to play with the INI entries :
ThumbnailMemoryLimit=…
ThumbnailPrealloc=…
?
¤ Else : Maybe it doesn't matter, but I don't use tabs at all, so you could compare the speed
when displaying a panel as thumbnails directly (tabs disabled)…

:mrgreen: KR
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HolgerK
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Post by *HolgerK »

2JohnFredC ,

Maybe customizing the folder to show only one single picture (Folder Properties->Customize->[Choose picture..] can speed up TCs thumbnail view in this case.
That's no solution for dynamic folder contents, but maybe one significant picture is enough to categorize the folder content.

It seems that folder thumbnails are not cached by TC.
Additional the thumbnail drawing starts first with the folder pictures.
Also if the normal file thumbnails are cached, the drawing is delayed by the folder thumbnail extraction.

Regards,
Holger
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Post by *Lefteous »

2JohnFredC
I wonder why you open new threads on thumbnail performance again and again. It's no surprise that other users give the same hints as in previous threads. All questions above have been answered in other threads.
No offense - but there are no news on this. If things would speed up you would probably realize it yourself.

Related threads:
http://www.ghisler.ch/board/viewtopic.php?t=6684
http://www.ghisler.ch/board/viewtopic.php?t=6993
http://www.ghisler.ch/board/viewtopic.php?t=9094
http://www.ghisler.ch/board/viewtopic.php?t=16321
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JohnFredC
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Post by *JohnFredC »

Lefteous wrote:2JohnFredC
I wonder why you open new threads on thumbnail performance again and again.
I wonder... why thumbnails are still slow! I wonder, is it only me? I wonder... am I the only one who experiences such behavior? Does no one else use TC in thumbs mode? Is it simply poorly designed? Or do most users only have 10 or so photos in the folders and no subfolders? I wonder what makes many dedicated image browsers so much faster with their thumbnail caches? Am I doing something wrong that TC should be so slow? Shoot, it's as slow as the non-cached commanders out there... or worse.

I start a new thread each time in the hopes of getting new information, or new forum attention to the problem, or a clarification of my misunderstanding. Or a new understanding, maybe.

Well, the only new understanding I ever seem get is the same old, same old: that the thumbnail display process in TC is slow and that I am nearly the only one who seems to think so, so maybe you are right, Lefteous... maybe I should keep quiet about it. Is that the message you meant to send me? Or is it only that obviously much more important message: one thread to serve them all, one thread to bind them?

Apologies for laying on the sarcasm but, geez gimme me a break, here!
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Post by *roentgen »

2JohnFredC
Most of us are tired of such "discussions" which only result in a "this is by design", only to mask the fact (but why?) that the author doesn't care a bit about the presented issue.
TC for Linux please!
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Post by *Lefteous »

2JohnFredC
one thread to serve them all
Adding a new post to an already existing thread would be the better way because it would avoid a bit redundancy. Users can only only give you the same hints as in the other threads.

Thumbnails are still slow because nothing has been changed on TC 7.0 - it's really that simple. During the TC 7.0 alpha testers I asked Ghisler about improving the thumbnail view speed. I don't know what else I can do to convince him that this is an issue.
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Post by *JohnFredC »

All right.

I just can't believe software that is so excellent is so many areas could perform so poorly in this area (of particular important to me personally) without having been fixed after all this time, so I automatically assume it's my fault and ask for help. Over and over again, admittedly.

At least the slowness of TC with thumbs appears to be common knowledge and not just the result of my specific environment.

I won't bring the topic up again.
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Post by *Hacker »

JohnFredC,
-Are folder thumbs cached?
No.
-Are all rendering methods cached?
Yes.
-Do all methods render, whether a previous method has already rendered?
I guess they render only if the previous method fails, though I am not 100% sure. Why not simply restrict the filetypes for each method?
-Is there a way to instruct TC what order to render thumbs in (which method first, which files first?)
No, the order of the methods is fixed.
-How do I tell TC to render all thumbs whether I have scrolled to them or not?
PreloadThumbnails=2
-Why does TC always re-render previously rendered thumbs when I switch back to a thumbed tab?
TC does not keep them in memory, it seems.

HTH
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Post by *JohnFredC »

PreloadThumbnails=2
This actually made a noticeable difference in the speed of rendering of some (but not all) of the image thumbs, especially the thumbs near the bottom of the list.

Thanks!
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Post by *Balderstrom »

Not much difference.

It took TC 54s to generate a 1.35MB tcthumbs.db (96x96) for one folder.

IrfanView takes 1-2s to create (100x100) thumbs (in memory). And 1-2s to save them to individual files.
The resultant 87 thumbnails take up 205KB (348 KB on disk, NTFS 4k (default) allocation unit)

WinXP's Thumb.db - which was distributed with the zip is 324KB

I've yet to see any advantage to using a single .DB file for thumbnails. Yet many disadvantages related to disk access and extremely slow to update a Thumbs.db file when images have been deleted.

If I actually had WinXP (instead of Win2K) I'd think one would be better off letter Explorer generate Thumb.db for folders, and viewing the .db file with the TC plugin decThumbsDBViewer3.

The file size of the .db is over 6 times larger than the same 100x100px images created by IrfanView, and the amount of time it takes leaves me scratching my head.
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Post by *ghisler(Author) »

Try to exclude tcthumbs.db from your virus scanner. It's a compound document like a word .doc, and some scanners take an awful lot of time to scan such files. :(
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Post by *Balderstrom »

I don't use a real-time virus scanner...I've installed SunBelt's Vipre, but its not running: I periodically manually scan my drives. With that and Malaware Bytes.

I do have SunBelt's Personal Firewall, but I do not have "Application Behaviour Blocking" enabled as that feature was absolutely insane in its paranoid implementation ... especially for someone that uses line-command tools - having to provide rule exceptions for 200+ .exe cmd line tools was crazy.
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