IrfanView Thumbnails

[Roger Mills]

Following recommendations in several NGs, I've recently installed IrfanView on my computer - and it came with a separate program called IrfanView Thumbnails, which is excellent for displaying thumbnails of all the pictures in a directory/folder so that you can see what's there more easily than with a list of filenames.

However, every time you point it at a folder, it re-creates the thumbnails - which can take quite a while if there are several thousand pictures in the folder.

Does anyone know whether there's a way of saving the thumbnails so that it doesn't need to create them every time? There's a "thumbnail options" item in the menu, but I can't find any likely options there - and the built-in Help only seems to cover how to edit pictures in the main program.

Help!

[brass monkey]

Unless you need to view unusual file types, Paint Shop Pro saves a thumbnail file which it reads each time you hit that folder. Certainly V4.12 does.

[Spamlet]

Not tried Irfan, but nowadays find Google's Picasa does just about everything one needs in managing photos. It also catalogues and shows all the pictures on the computer (even other users: so be careful...). In the newsgroups it is particularly handy for instantly uploading to web albums.

S

[Lobster]

...and there was me worrying that you'd gone and clouted yourself on the hand with a hammer and ended up with a particularly nasty condition as a result...

David

[stuart noble]

Yes, hard to fault Picasa for the casual user

[Vortex7]

I think Picasa is great bar one irritation.

It has a smart "autorotate" feature that rotates images for correct display, but does NOT rotate the original image on HDD. All well and good but if subsequently you browse to "My Pictures" outside Picasa and see an image that needs rotating - and rotate it.......you then have to manually rotate it back in Picasa.

Not a showstopper...just rather annoying.

It also would be nice if Picasa had a "panorama" creation tool like the one in Windows Live Photo Gallery (that is a really really cool tool).

[stuart noble]

Yes, I'd noticed that. Particularly annoying with IPhone pictures I receive. Whatever I do with them they seem to default to the original portrait view, but only in some applications. IPhone videos are a pain too, but I don't receive enough to sort the problem out.

[Jules Richardson]

It may be that it's just checking all the files on disk to see if they've changed; even that can take a surprising amount of time depending on how many files you have and what sort of media they're on.

re. picasa, I use the web-based albums, but I'm always wary of things that have sharing abilities, so have steered clear of the application side of things (assuming there's even a Linux version anyway)

cheers

Jules

[Spamlet]

I would tend not to rotate original images as this is a resampling exercise that can lose detail: if you want to work on the picture again or sample and edit parts of it, it is always best to start from scratch if possible, and do the minimum number of processes to it that will get the result you are after.

S

[Clive George]

Rotating through 90 degrees, which is what you normally need to do, can be done without loss.

[Andy Burns]

Not necessarily, if the source image is a jpg and depending on what subsampling is used, the exact value of some pixels will depend on the values of other pixels, rotate them and the relationship changes, the difference may be subtle (almost imperceptible for a good quality image) but there *is* change/loss ...

[Clive George]

Not at 90/180/270 degrees if your image is an exact multiple of the MCU size, which most are, and if your software is up to it.

[Roger Mills]

No, it's actually creating the thumbnails - gradually replacing a list of filenames with their thumbnails - displaying progess (e.g. 250/2497) in the title bar.

I'd not heard of Picasa prior to this thread. Sounds a possibility - but I'd still like to be able to fix IrfanView Thumbnails if possible.

[Spamlet]

If you have several thousand pictures in one folder I think your problem will not be exclusive to Irfan. It would certainly happen with my windows Explorer - though this is a pretty old laptop...

I would break the folders down into more usable sub units if I was you.

S.

[Matty F]

I've not found anwhere that says that IrfanView keeps its thumbnails. In fact it seems to be a feature that it DOESN'T have a large thumbnail file. ThumbsPlus certainly retains the thumbnails it generates. In fact it even retains the thumbnails for pictures that were on offline drives so you can search by name or picture similarity while the drives are offline.

[gb]

Adding more RAM would help speed the process. I use IrfanView Thumbnails. It's pretty fast for me with 2 Gig RAM but I do split the pics into no more than 500 or so in each folder. Geoff Beale