I am currently trying to figure out why I have extremely slow (and repeated) Thumbnail cache regeneration, but I am a bit confused by how Directory Opus handles thumbnails.
Are thumbnails always handled separately from Windows or is Directory Opus supposed to use the thumbnails if there were already created by Windows thumbnail handling?
Example:
I enter a folder using Windows Explorer, all thumbnails show up immediately as Windows aready has them in the cache.
I enter the same folder with Directory Opus in Thumbnail View, but Directory Opus shows all photos with Icons and starts building the cache, one by one.
Isn't Directory Opus supposed to get the thumbnails from Windows if they already exist?
I am testing with folders containing around 600 JPG and HEIC from iPhones. So far I get the same results no matter if the folders are on my local SSD or on a network share.
Is there a way to force Directory Opus to use the Windows cache (on HEIC files)?
Directory Opus is extremely slow, despite multi-threading. And to make matters worse, it decides to recreate thumbnails on the same folders, despite the cache being on and being far from the cache size limit. I ran into this behavior with my few test folders (local and network), I spent far too much time on this already (few hours this morning with the same few folders containing lots of HEIC files).
I'd prefer if the Windows cache is used, since I could use WinThumbsPreloader to populate the Windows thumbnail cache, while I currently see no way to cache all thumbnails with DirectoryOpus apart from opening folder by folder and drinking a lot of tee in between.
You could try disabling the HEIC viewer plugin, which would make Opus fall back on the shell.
I don't know why the speed would be so different, though. Opus ultimately uses the same decoder that File Explorer uses, and HEIC files should not take long to decode unless the device they are on is slow.
When you say disable the HEIC viewer plugin, you mean this?
Disabling this does indeed make a big difference. I had it enabled, as it is the default. I am using my local SSD for all these tests.
Having said that, with this thing enabled when I open a folder with HEIC images in Thumbnail view (I tried nailing it down by moving batches of images to individual folders), it takes first forever to create the Thumbs (I am talking 15 minutes for 100 images) and fills up the memory (32GB used by Directory Opus with 32GB physical memory available).
With it disabled (thanks for the suggestion), it's much faster (~ 2 minutes) and more importantly memory won't fill up.
Does disabling this now also rely on Windows for the cache? Because before disabling it, it would actually not cache said HEIC thumbnails within Directory Opus, so sometimes it would spend another hour to recreate the same thumbnails on my tests, just by entering the folder again 1 minutes later.
There is something strange going on. I keep it disabled for now.
Let me know if I can upload any debug information (and how).
Directory Opus 13.11 x64
Local on SSD Samsung 990 Pro
Files are all coming from iPhone.
It sounds like there’s an issue with the particular HEIC images you’re thumbnailing and the HEIC codec version that’s installed.
The shell normally uses the same codec as Opus, so I’m surprised if it’s behaving differently, unless it’s just a matter of the thumbnails already being cached by the shell (so it may have had issues in the past butt no longer has to decode the images as they’re cached).
What happens if you make a copy of the whole folder snd then have File Explorer generate thumbnails for all those new files?
