As part of my work, I have to handle a pretty large volume of Stock Image files - around 15GB currently. That's apart from a few GB of clipart.
Typically, I use thumbnail mode for these folders and would like to get some clarification on a few questions I have:
What can I do to speed up thumbnail rendering - I currently have the "Cache thumbnails" option set to 200MB and the "Load all thumbnails in a folder automatically" checked. Despite this, when I enter a folder it often takes 10-15 seconds for all thumbnails to be built - in a folder containing a 100 images or so.
Given I'm going in and out of these folders all day long, it gets pretty annoying. What can I do to get thumbnails displayed immediately?
With so many stock images, it's a given that there are going to be some odd image formats. I have quite a few files from Corel Stock Images that are in Photo CD format (.pcd). Unfortuantely, DOpus doesn't recognize this format by default, so I only get the big file icon.
Double clicking the file opens it in MS Photo Editor (that ships with MS-Office) - so does this mean the OS understands this format? I do have the Use shell image extraction option checked, but that doesn't seem to do anything for .pcd files.
Hope you guys can help me out here - thanks!
Oh just in case it's useful - I'm running DOpus 9.0.0.9 on Windows XP SP2. Hardware is 1.6 Ghz Pentium Mobile CPU, with 1 GB of RAM. The files are sitting on an external hard drive connected via USB - the drive shows up as a local disk drive in "My Computer"
First thing to work out is if the cache is running slowly, or if it's simply not being used.
Could you close any open Opus windows, empty the thumbnail cache and then disable the cache, then see if the thumbnails are any faster or slower?
I don't know much about the Photo CD format but if you don't get thumbnails in Explorer then you won't see them in Opus either, since there isn't an Opus plugin for them and nothing in Explorer means there also isn't a shell thumbnail provider either.
If it were me I'd probably batch-convert the Photo CD files into a more common format but maybe that's not practical.
Leo - apologies for not replying earlier. I don't have access to the stock images collection when working remotely and couldn't run any experiments.
Caching & Thumbnails
So here's what I did for testing the cache:
Emptied the cache. Dragged the slider to the minimum (apparently cache can't be set to zero). Unchecked all options under "Cache thumbnails for images located on".
Closed and reopened Dopus. Navigated to a folder containing 100 images (each about 3.5mb). Total time to build thumbnails = 20 seconds.
In settings. Reset cache size to 100MB. Checked all options under "Cache thumbnails for images located on".
Closed and reopened Dopus. Under cache settings, checked to see that Cache folder size was still empty. Navigated to same folder as before and waited for all thumbnails to build. Total time was still 20 seconds.
Closed and reopened Dopus. Went to same folder - total time to build thumbnails is now ~1 second.
So I can safely say the cache does in fact work. The only issue seems to be that building thumbnails is a foreground process - a lister has to be open for the entire time it takes for the thumbnails to build. Previous attempts at opening a folder, letting a few thumbnails build and moving on did not help subsequent folder access times.
Like I mentioned in my earlier post - I have about 15GB of stock images currently, organized in about 54 top-level folders, and several of these folders have multiple sub-folders.
To try and build open new listers for each folder by hand till the thumbnail builds is a thought that makes my soul wither and die
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Earlier research in the help file shows that a option "REFRESHTHUMBS" exists under the GO command. Is there a way to walk-down a folder tree and issue the GO /REFRESHTHUMBS command at each level?
PCD Files:
A quick check in Windows Explorer (the horror!) shows that in fact no thumbnails appear even in the stock Explorer window. So it is a odd-ball image format problem more than anything else.
Re: your suggestion to switch to another format - I can't readily convert PCD files to another format that DOpus understands simply because each vendor provides a catalog file with keywords/descriptions for the stock images and the catalog files reference the PCD filenames.
Yes, if you change directories while the thumbnails are still being generated then Opus will stop generating them and thus they won't be cached. This is usually desirable since you don't want Opus (and your CPU/HDD) wasting time making thumbnails that you're not going to look at.
If you want to make Opus cache all the thumbnails then you could go to the top of the directory structure, enter Flat View mode, then switch to Thumbnails and leave the lister for a while. Watch out though as if you have a lot of images then this can use a lot of memory which can lead to other problems...