How do I stop this annoying Win XP "feature"?

[Caveman]

When I go to browse and/or print a photo from the Win XP Photo viewer via opening up "My Pictures", the entire directory of pictures that I open must load prior to me being able to view or print. This is especially annoying when you've got 100 photos in a directory and all of them must load just to selct 1 for printing. There's got to be some switch or something to keep this from happening. Also, all the pictures show up as thumbnails, is there any way I can force then to show as names to "speed up" their load times...???

 

[Psych]

Last time I checked, you could still click on and work with files before the whole process completes. But, you could turn off thumbnails in the viewing properties of that folder to speed everything up, although you would obviously lose the thumbnails.

 

[Caveman]

Actually, it seems that turning off the thumbnails is impossible in the "My Pictures" directory. Anyone been successful at this?

 

[AtTheGates]

I have My Pictures in Details view. No secret as far as I know. Just selected Details from the View menu. Using XP Pro.

 

[Caveman]

Using XP Home... Problem seems to be that each icon for each file wants to update from the default to a "Photoshop Icon" type and this is what takes so long... Each icon in a directory of hundreds takes about 1 sec each to "update"...

Also, when using the view it wants to load all pics in the directory into the viewer when you click on just one pic. How annoying... Isn't there a way to get the viewer to only view the pics you're interested in?

 

[Psych]

Um, my "My Pictures" folder doesn't generate thumbnails. Go to view and change the selection from thumbnails to tiles or something. If XP is automatically making the view thumbnail everytime, try adding in some non-picture files into the folder to confuse the folder options, and it will default to tiles.

 

[Caveman]

Thanks for your help. I'm doing a poor job of explaining my frustrations... There are 2 problems:

1) When I go into a sub directory under "My Pictures" that is full of pics, each pic loads with an icon of "Photoshop" (even though the file is supposed to be associated with the M'soft XP viewer... I guess this could be a Photoshop prob...)

2) When you try to print "just one picture" from the M'soft viewer, and that picture is one of say 100 photos in that directory, it wants to load all 100 thumbnails into the viewer wizard so that you can select "one" to print (even though you already have).

Seems like it should be "smart enough" to know I have "already" selected a picture to print by double clicking it...

 

[RVN]

How about cleaning the registry? Do you have a registry cleaner?

Reclaim the file extension ...first go to control panel>folder options>view and uncheck "hide file extensions" then go to control panel>folder options>file types(I'm guessing jpeg) and change always open with.... and change it back to "windows picture and fax viewer"

Post back if you need a rec for a reg cleaner...

This concentrates on problem #1 which might indemnify problem #2

 

[RVN]

Also, move the pictures to another location...

 

[RVN]

Do you have "Cache Thumbnails" enabled? ...not that I would advocate increasing your hard drive overhead. Control Panel>Folder Options>View ...check "Cache Thumbnails" or uncheck it if it is.

Come on ...Help me!

 

[Caveman]

Thanks for the help! Sorry so long on the reply... I tried moving the pictures, changing the view to Windows fax and Pic Viewer and changed the thumbnails to cache... None of these things seemed to have made a difference...

I have not tried a reg cleaner yet... Don't have one...

If I find the solution I'll report back...

 

[KeyserSoze]

I had this SAME problem. It's with Photoshop directly. I forgot where I found the search, but try Google for "Thumbnails photoshop WinXP" or a combination like that. I found the fix that way.
(Minus the quotes)

I think it was on annoyances.org or some site like that.





KeyserSoze

 

[tyanni]

see http://www.knitwitology.net/pickabar/archives/004323.html

"PhotoShop Causes Slowness Of Folders With Thumbnail View In XP"

One of the things I like about WinXp is the ability to use the Thumbnail View in folders that contain image files. However, my system has been really slow in rendering the thumnails, and occasionally Explorer itself has crashed. I have a pretty souped up machine (or at least it was six months ago), so I really couldn't understand it.

Well, today I accidentally searched google (I meant to type in an IM window) and bumped into a thread called Windows XP slow to display folders with images. Long story short, Photoshop 7's Thumbnail feature seems to not behave nicely with XP's similar feature. If you're experiencing this issue, right click a file whose type is registered to Photoshop (say a JPG or GIF) and choose properties. You should see a tab called "Photoshop Image". Just un-check the "Generate Thumbnails" checkbox and you should be on your way.

 

[Caveman]

Outstanding! Thank you Tyranni, this fixed the problem...

 

[tyanni]

glad to help.