Folders with a lot of stuff in them take ages to load

[Illyaimi]

I have like a folder that's on an SSD, 3k files, pictures mostly, and it takes forever for them to be put in the right order and "load," even though all the thumbnails should be already generated. Why is that? I never really understood it, it's been a thing forever. Does anyone else ever think about this or finds it annoying? If yes how do you solve it?

 

[emosun]

5 minutes ago, Illyaimi said:

Does anyone else ever think about this or finds it annoying? If yes how do you solve it?

they invented ssds , or they put the files into more than a single folder

[Applefreak]

6 minutes ago, Illyaimi said:

I have like a folder that's on an SSD, 3k files, pictures mostly, and it takes forever for them to be put in the right order and "load," even though all the thumbnails should be already generated. Why is that? I never really understood it, it's been a thing forever. Does anyone else ever think about this or finds it annoying? If yes how do you solve it?

 

Windows is creating preview images, that is why it takes so long. The amount of files in the folder doesn't really help either. If you want to access a specific file, open cmd and navigate to it. Works super fast. Also consider other image gallery applications to manage your gallery. File Explorer is still single threaded and the SSD is great but the system is not utilizing both really well. Instead of updating those features, MS added or is about to add tabs, weather, news into File Explorer, because that is what we all need.....

 

Short solution, smaller folders or a dedicated file manager, don't ask me, my image galleries are a mess as well. I haven't had a proper image gallery since the early Mac OS 10.1 days.

[Takumidesh]

even if the explorer software is written very well, its still an O(n) problem. it is always going to take longer the more files that need to be loaded.

 

The easiest solution as others have pointed is just splitting them in multiple directories.

even as simple as sort1a, sort1b, etc... will help alot

[Vishera]

19 minutes ago, Illyaimi said:

I have like a folder that's on an SSD, 3k files, pictures mostly, and it takes forever for them to be put in the right order and "load," even though all the thumbnails should be already generated. Why is that? I never really understood it, it's been a thing forever. Does anyone else ever think about this or finds it annoying? If yes how do you solve it?

I am using a high end hard drive and never had anything like that happening:

 

 

And i have folders with 20,000 files in them...

[WhitetailAni]

3 minutes ago, Vishera said:

I am using a high end hard drive and never had anything like that happening:

 

 

And i have folders with 20,000 files in them...

Copying files is different from displaying them in Explorer

[Vishera]

11 minutes ago, FakeKGB said:

Copying files is different from displaying them in Explorer

Yeah i know, i posted this screenshot for clarity so that people won't think it's the average hard drive.

I have a folder with 20,000 files and they instantaneously load in windows explorer.

 

It's weird because SSDs should have high random read performance than my hard drive,

Could QLC D-RAMless SATA SSD drives be that slow?

[Illyaimi]

22 minutes ago, emosun said:

they invented ssds , or they put the files into more than a single folder

Well, it's an ssd, and it's my sort folder, so it's stuff that's waiting to be sorted, but still...

 

17 minutes ago, Applefreak said:

Short solution, smaller folders or a dedicated file manager, don't ask me, my image galleries are a mess as well. I haven't had a proper image gallery since the early Mac OS 10.1 days.

Might need to look into the file manager route. I already use something called Hydrus for pictures, but these are stuff that is not sorted yet. I just thought if I already cached the thumbnails (isn't this done on every folder in windows and you can even reset them?) it wouldn't take minutes to sort a few thousand files every time the folder is newly opened.

 

It also feels like file explorer is just kinda slow in general, not sure why. Like sometimes I have to restart the process cuz folders don't load at all.

[Illyaimi]

Ok did some googling, found this https://files.community/download

 

Testing it now but it instantly sorted and grouped the same folder that file explorer was struggling with for me, even when the thumbnails didn't finish loading in yet. I will update the thread later if I like it and it works fine. Thanks for the tips!

[mariushm]

It loads slow because Windows Explorer probably creates thumbnails and probably tries to read EXIF and/or other things for each picture like width , height, number of colors etc

 

I use total commander so I don't know if you maybe have Windows Explorer options and from there, probably you can uncheck some option.

 

Maybe

Display file icon on thumbnails

Display file size information in folder tips

Show preview handlers in preview pane

 

Also in folder properties there's the option "Allow files in this folder to have contents indexed in addition ... " - don't know if it would make any difference, I think this is supposed to be more for searching files, not make a difference when viewing files.

[Illyaimi]

1 minute ago, mariushm said:

It loads slow because Windows Explorer probably creates thumbnails and probably tries to read EXIF and/or other things for each picture like width , height, number of colors etc

 

I use total commander so I don't know if you maybe have Windows Explorer options and from there, probably you can uncheck some option.

 

Maybe

Display file icon on thumbnails

Display file size information in folder tips

Show preview handlers in preview pane

 

Also in folder properties there's the option "Allow files in this folder to have contents indexed in addition ... " - don't know if it would make any difference, I think this is supposed to be more for searching files, not make a difference when viewing files.

Yeah it probably has to do something with thumbnails, but I feel like there should be a cache where it keeps them and fetches them from rather than take minutes to load every time.

 

I will try those and rebuilding indexing if the current program I downloaded ends up not working well enough, thanks.

[Takumidesh]

22 minutes ago, Illyaimi said:

Yeah it probably has to do something with thumbnails, but I feel like there should be a cache where it keeps them and fetches them from rather than take minutes to load every time.

 

I will try those and rebuilding indexing if the current program I downloaded ends up not working well enough, thanks.

are you paging by any chance? and is the page file on an HDD.

 

Also I think windows has some options for file indexing, I imagine if that is disabled it can slow down the process quite a lot.

[Applefreak]

52 minutes ago, Illyaimi said:

Ok did some googling, found this https://files.community/download

 

Testing it now but it instantly sorted and grouped the same folder that file explorer was struggling with for me, even when the thumbnails didn't finish loading in yet. I will update the thread later if I like it and it works fine. Thanks for the tips!

Interesting, I will have to try that one myself.