If you open a folder that contains many pictures, a blue "wait animation" is displayed in the upper right corner of the Lister.
In the background the metadata of the images (e.g. width and height) are read. For example, if you want to display the height in a column, the values for it appear immediately.
This background activity, however, requires quite a lot of resources (especially for folders with many images). That is impractical, especially on a notebook.
I have meant to raise a similar request to this. It would be handy if you we could right click on the blue spinning wheel to cancel the background process.
Situations where i have wanted to use this are, when i have a layout set up and am moving around folders. I don't want to change the layout, but i also don't want it to keep loading all the data.
Dopus then apparently reads all exif values in the background. If I display the column "F-Number" sometime, all values are there immediately.
The problem now is that I can't disable the two columns "Status Icons" and "Availability" permanently.
I delete the two columns and save the format:
For "normal" folders, this will then be applied permanently. In the dropbox the two columns appear again. So as a workaround I assigned the width 1 to the columns so that they are not displayed. But this means that all metadata is always read in the background.
When you save new defaults, those two columns are automatically added for the Dropbox folder, since they're usually important and it would be a pain to have to add special columns like them after changing the defaults. (Similarly, Path is added to Collections, so Find Results etc. tell you where things are.)
You can edit the OneDrive* format within Preferences if you want to explicitly remove them.
(*It's used for both OneDrive and DropBox.)
I'd be surprised if those columns are triggering EXIF data to be read, however.
Do you have any labels set up which inspect metdata? Those would cause it to be read whether or not the columns are in use.
A folder with 1500 images and the columns "Status Icons" and "Availability" creates a background task of 40 s duration.
If you then show the column "F-Number", this value is immediately available for all images.
Without the columns "Status Icons" and "Availability" there is no background task after opening the folder. If you then show the column "F-Number", the values for it will appear successively. It again takes about 40 s until all of them are displayed.
Disabling the OneDrive format helped. Many thanks for the suggestion. The link between the columns "Status Icons" and "Availability" and the reading of the Exif values is rather impractical, though
Maybe but calculation start even if only filename column is display.
Also, when I display folder with many pictures and enable thumbnail mode, I want to stop thumbnail generation after some minutes (I know option 'Start loading thumbnails before they become visible')
