Picture taking forever to open

large *.jpg's take a rediculous time to load... *.png's will *always* take a moment or two b/c they are compressed... so each time you access them the comp has to decompress 'em before it can do any displaying.

however... if you're seeing times of over like a full minute or something truly obnoxious... then there is indeed a problem... the fix most likely involves upgrading or o/cing depending on how much fun you want to have and how much $$$ you want to spend

 

what kind of ram do you have in that box? (ie manufacturer, specific model #, latency)

 

Jpg's are compressed as well. Png's take the same amount of time to open on my machine.

To the original poster. Have you tried to set your default image program to something else? That would at least narrow it down to a problem with the computer or a problem with that POS program that comes with XP. I'd recommend trying irfanview if you don't have another lightwight image viewer you like.

 

Sounds like some sort of drive problem. Does it need to be defragmented? Sounds like that's what it could be. It should NOT take that long to open any kind of picture file. I've opened beautiful, high resolution pictures on fairly not-that-great computers, and they still open decent.

 

yeah, defragmenting was the first thing i thought of. If the picture is in 10 different places it will take a while.

 

i do not think the built in windows picture viewer is at fault, especially if it can open a picture from the camera drive quickly.

Sounds like the hard drive is really slow...... but is the hard drive slow for loading programs off it?

Do you use an IDE hard drive... and if so, is there another device connected to the same IDE channel that was running at the same time.... like a cd rom or something.

I recommend you try and COPY the picture to another directory on the hard drive... and see if that fixes it.

If it does not, the only advice i can offer is to run a virus scan, and spyware removal tool such as microsoft antispyware Beta 1. Also, when you try and open the picture, do any processes take up an abnormal amout of CPU %?

~Good luck, and keep us posted.

 

The easiest, but least exact, way to determine if the problem is the drive (fragmentation, for instance) would probably be to listen for disk activity when you open the images.
Also, how much free space on the partition? If it's getting full it'll reduce the performance (Mostly because of fragmentation).

 

yep... that's it... i never thought about that.

but it's exactly what's happening.

you know those little arrows that can switch between pix for you? it's gotta load those pix some time... that's why it looks around in the folder...

i'll be dipped... that's what it is.

 

You hit the nail on the head.

When you select multiple pictures, windows fax and picture viewer will ONLY switch to the pictures selected. but, when you just open one, i guess it searches everything in the directory. (i know that if you just double click one picture, and you press the forward or back button's you can browse other pictures, so it must load them.)

My guess, like you said, is that when it found a dead link, i bet it did a quick search of the windows Indexing service for drive C: .... to see if it could find the program in another location ... and that is probably what took so long.

Now that i think of it, this might have been the cause to a problem i had in the past... hm.

I'm glad you figured it out.

 

Nice detective work

But I have to say thats pretty crappy programming on Microsoft's part... As a programmer, I can understand a delay for a nonexistent network share, but it shouldn't take more than a few milliseconds to figure out that a LOCAL directory isn't there...

 

that is very good information to have...

 

And to be honest, they could have backgrounded this in some way instead of letting it block. (Then again, explorer.exe still freezes for quite some time if you try to browse a non-working network share, something they should have fixed years ago.)

 

i read your post and signed up just to say that you diagnosed the problem very well and i appreciate a thorough understanding of what was happening as it happened to me too.

 

Wow thanks, I had this problem years, never really understood why it was happing until today it was bugging me that much that I decided to go onto a major google mission to try and find a solution and you thread what popped up, the problem I had was that I always have a shortcut to a shared network drive on my desktop but that drive isn't always on, anyway I know this is an old thread and I'm not sure if you even still post on here but thanks alot anyway.

 

Dude, you're brilliant!

Thank you very much for this!

 

Damn, this has happened to me too, I have always wondered what it was! That's awesome man, thanks a bunch for that info!

 

Did you recently update or change antiviruses? Some antiviruses such as F-Secure will make even the latest i7 extreme feel sluggish like some old Pentium 90. Any operation, even opening file system folders, takes time as the AV scans the whole folder contents before you even try to access any files inside it.