I am not sure if this is possible at all, but would certainly be a nifty little feature.
When generating thumbnails in a directory, perhaps have a semi-transparent progress bar (somewhere not in your face) showing the progress of the thumbnail generation. I often have large directories and would find it useful.
Maybe the status bar is a good place for this, like when a page is loading in a web browser.
perhaps like a browser, but something that counts to 100% and not just an animated icon stating it is still working.... or perhaps like a pie chart filling up or something
Looked in the status bar of your browser lately while a page is loading? 
(Assuming you use IE or Firefox anyway. Maybe not all browsers have it but there's a proper progress bar down there in IE/FF.)
I use FF, and the progress bar is in the actual tab itself. So perhaps something similar in DO. Have the progress bar take up the width of the tab and then disappear once the job is done.
[quote="FatherTime"]I am not sure if this is possible at all, but would certainly be a nifty little feature.
[/quote]
This would be a GREAT feature! I use Dopus when browsing through the picturearcive at work, a progressbar would be outstanding!
I'd love to see this as well, as the only indication you currently get when processing all images in a folder containing thousands of them is your PC's HDD LED. I'd prefer if it worked something similar to how XYPlorer does it 
How does XYPlorer do it?
or even how Faststone does it (www.faststone.org) - freeware
Why does it matter? It happens on a background thread, it's not like you have to wait for it to finish. What decisions are you planning to make based on the progress of the thumbnail generation?
I use the thumbnail-display to see through pictures for the magazine I am working on. Since the pics are rather big, it takes some times to develop the thumbs. I could be doing other stuff with other listers while the generation is doing its work, letting me know in the statusbar when it is finnished.
Its not a critical thing, this statusbar-thing, but it would be nice.
That still doesn't explain what use a status bar would be Opus automatically generates the thumbnails in LIFO (last-in-first-out) order, so as you scroll around the Lister you will always see the thumbnails for the currently visible files appear quickly.
It is the little things that matters.
Why have I bought several licenses for Dopus? Because its preferences is HUGE, and I can sit and adjust it all day if I wanted too.
Why do I "need" this statusbar-thingy? Beacuse I am a geek.
This field is not a big thing, it is just that the operating system never tells me what it does, so I wanted my beloved Dopus to tell me what IT was doing making my harddrive-led flash.
Again, it is all the small things that is making Dopus so fun.
(It COULD be my early brain not working, too... 
)
Well, it doesn't really do it much differently that any other application, but I like how it displays how many images out of X total it has processed (see attached image) and not a 1-100% status bar (something that doesn't really tell you anything). It also allows you to press ESC to cancel the thumbnail creation process, which is also something I'd like to see in Dopus (very useful if you enable the "Load all thumbnails on folder automatically" feature. With 1000's of images in a folder, the thumb creation process can be quite CPU intensive...).
I do have to say though, this isn't really a "big thing" and I most certainly won't loose any sleep over it, but it'd be nice to have it as an option anyway
The way XYplorer does it is nice, but then we run into the problem of how to display something like that in DO. I use a custom status bar on the bottom, so doing something like XYPlorer would be somewhat difficult to implement i would think. Certainly more difficult than a bar the width of a tab going across it
It would be generally nice to know what background threads do and what is their progress.
I constantly have problem of such kind:
I enter RAR with lots of images and start thumbnailing. Then I use Back before all thumbnails are done. Then I try to enter another RAR, but it's not possible, presumable because thumbnailing thread still locks RAR plugin and I have to wait a few minutes until it's free. After some such fiddling RAR plugin breaks completely and I have to quit DO to be able to enter RAR archives again.
Knowing the status of plugin thread and being avaliable to terminate it would partially solve my problem.
X.
I don't think having progress in the status bar would be that hard since Opus already lets you add bars showing X out of Y for any X and Y from the available statusbar codes. (Well, it may still be hard for other reasons, but the display code is already there.)
Having the option to show it in the statusbar (by using a couple of new statusbar codes) as well as the option to show it in folder tabs (via a checkbox in Prefs) would be ideal.
Folder tabs may not be visible if you only have one folder open (depending on Prefs) so the statusbar is ideal then. But when you have several folder tabs open, showing progress in the tabs is good because you can flick to another tab and still monitor the progress.
For what it's worth, I'd probably use this feature. On a slow drive and/or one with files which take a long time to thumbnail (videos especially), it's nice to wait until the processing is done before looking around the folder. If you don't then you're always waiting a few seconds to see something every time you scroll. Whether it's worth adding depends on how much effort it takes, though.
The ability to stop the thumbnailing thread doesn't seem that useful since you can switch to Details mode and it will stop after the current file is done. I would, however, like to be able to stop the background thread which collects file information for the Description, etc. column. Sometimes I go into Flat mode or enter a huge directory with the Desc. column on and I then realise I don't want the info in the column. Although it's on a background thread, all of the drive access (or network usage) can be annoying. Turning off the Desc. column doesn't stop the background thread but leaving the folder does, so you have to leave, turn off the column, then come back. A Stop button or something would be nicer, I think, and could work with thumbnails as well for people who want that.
Nudel....
No it would not be hard to implement, but I do not necessarily want the generation of thumbnail x of y to always be present on the status bar. I view a lot of pix, but not always. Perhaps have a dynamic status bar that will display x of y if and when you are in thumbnail mode only.
But I like your suggestion of having options for both status bar and folder tab display as ideal.
A stop button to stop thumbnail generation... not sure I see the point of that. If you do not want thumbs, just switch to another view like details or the like. I would be more interested in stopping the description column from generating. Takes a lot of time when one has thousands of pictures in a single folder.
I was thinking the information would be hidden when not applicable, the same as lots of status bar information is (or can be, depending on config).
I totally agree, but I figure if a Stop button is added for one then it might as well work for both. Someone might be viewing a big dir and only care about thumbnails for part of it or something.
[quote="FatherTime"]Nudel....
that. If you do not want thumbs, just switch to another view like details or the like. [/quote]
Seems not so for images inside an archive.
X.
