Is there a way to manually request that Opus create thumbnails for all thumbnail-able files in a directory structure?
I recently was forced to expand my disk space and took the opportunity to reorganize my graphics files. The new disk space is attached to a little network storage computer which I'm mostly accessing via wireless network. Many of the images I have are very large. This combination of large images and slow disk access over the wireless make thumbnail generation a long and tedious process. I'd love to be able to point Opus at a directory and have it start generating thumbnails for all the subdirectories.
The closest I've come has been to use Flat View to pull all (or, at least, a lot of) the images into a single lister, but that appears to ignore the setting of "Load all thumbnails in a folder automatically" (which I have turned ON). I find I have to page down through the lister, pausing for a couple seconds on each page so Opus queues those files up for thumbnail generation.
Does the "Load all thumbnails in a folder automatically" setting work for you outside of Flat View? I will try to confirm whether it's supposed to work in Flat View.
For now, you might be able to get all the thumbs to generate and be cached by holding the down-arrow key to scroll through the list. As I understand it (which may be wrong), when an image becomes visible it is added to the top of the "generate thumbnails" list, so scrolling through making each image visible should make Opus want to cache them all, whether of not the "load all thumbnails..." setting is in effect.
Once you've cached the thumbnails, keep in mind that changing the settings of some plugins (those which have settings that change the look of their thumbnails) may clear the cache, requiring them all to be re-generated. (Whether or not they have anything to do with the plugin in question.)
Another thing to keep in mind with network drives is that some things will timeout when generating a thumbnail so if it takes too long they might not get one. This happens for folders and for video files, to my knowledge. The timeout is several seconds so it usually isn't an issue. You can adjust the movie plugin's timeout if you want but, of course, it will mean that slow movie files may delay other thumbnails from appearing when they are not cached.
The "Load all thumbnails in a folder automatically" does work outside of flat view. Though it stops generating thumbnails if you leave the folder, so you have to visit each one and stay until the thumbnails have all been generated.
Your idea of scrolling through all the files with the arrow key seems to be working. I had to narrow the lister to be one thumbnail wide and it took a while to get to the end, but it does appear to be still loading files (based on network usage). This is obviously a bit tricky to determine since inspecting the situation changes it. I'll wait for the network activity to die down, widen the lister and quickly scroll through to look for missing thumbnails.
The thing about thumbnails needing to be regenerated due to changes in plug-in settings makes having some way to do this in one shot all the more important. I don't mind wiring the laptop to the network and leaving it running overnight if I can fairly easily get all the thumbnails regenerated while I sleep.
The thumbnail generation just finished. Scrolling through the flat view did the trick. Thanks. I'd still like to see the thumbnail generation made available as a programmable command so I could create my own button to do it manually, but this works in the meantime.