Picture taking forever to open

H

h41cyon

Weaksauce
Joined
Jan 13, 2004
Messages
117
Just recently I encountered an annoying little problem. Any JPG/PNG on my computer takes forever to open with the built in windows picture and fax viewer. It used to take like a second for a wallpaper to open, but now, it sometimes takes 15 seconds. I just sits at the "generating preview..." and bleh.

I tried searching around and the onlything I found was to defrag the HD, well i did that and its still pooched.

Any help?
 
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 :D
 
Not exactly. These images used to take only a short time to load, very quick.


My system:
athlon-xp mobile oc'ed to 2200mhz
1gig of pc3200 cas 2.5
7200 WD 120gig hd
geforce 6800


I really dont think its my system....
 
what kind of ram do you have in that box? (ie manufacturer, specific model #, latency)
 
starhawk said:
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 :D
Click to expand...

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.
 
Interesting new information on this:


I just plugged in a digital camera of mine and an external harddrive showed up in explorer, yes all old stuff, but when i tired to open a picture that was stored on the camera, the 800K picture opened up in about 1 second, and right after, i tried opening a 200K JPG on my desktop, it took 7 seconds. It must be something with the drive, you think?
 
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).
 
WEIRD,

Ok, i've done some more tests and the results are very interesting.

To test the idea of the hd being very defragmented, i copied a picture that was taking forever to open from my desktop, and placed a copy of it on my desktop. As i suspected, the picture still took a very long time to open, 8seconds for a 100k jpg. I placed this picure on a second harddrive, and opened it, and it opened instantaneously.

SO ha HA, eureka, My harddrive C: is pooched then right?..... NO

I re copied the same picture to c:\ instead of just on my desktop, and tried opening it, now it should have took like 8 seconds, but it opened instantly. So WTF! It takes 8seconds to load up on my desktop but go a few directories higher up to C:\ and it opens a picture up instantly.

So then i went back to my desktop, and again, it still took 8 seconds to open the file. So I did this. I created a new folder on my desktop and copied the picture into that folder. It opened right away! So then it must have something to do with other files located in the same folder. So i cleared up my desktop and moved everything into a folder except for that one 8 second picture. When i tried it, it opened instantly........ I also found this 8 second thing also happened in a different directory, so it wasnt just a "desktop" thing.

So then i went about removing each file on the desktop and opening up the picture to pin point what type of file and or files were causing this slow down in the picture viewer.


AMAZING RESULTS!!!

turns out i found out what was causing the slow down. On my desktop I had two links to exe files for games i had uninstalled. so they were dead links. As soon as these were gone, the picture opened up instantly. Ok, so what was slowing down the picture in the other folder? .... turns out i had a link to a network folder that was no longer active. remove this and every picture in that folder opens up instantly.


Conclusion:

When opening up a picture using Windows Picture and Fax Viewer, if there exists within that same directory a dead LNK file, this will cause some slow down with the application.

Why this occurs? Perhaps when loading the application, it first scans the directory to make a note of the available pictures for like a slide show purpose. When encountering a dead link, the program hangs for a period of time.

Give it a try, I bet this isnt just a localized case.
 
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.
 
h41cyon said:
Why this occurs? Perhaps when loading the application, it first scans the directory to make a note of the available pictures for like a slide show purpose. When encountering a dead link, the program hangs for a period of time.
Click to expand...


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...
 
korpse said:
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...
Click to expand...


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.
 
h41cyon said:
WEIRD,

Ok, i've done some more tests and the results are very interesting.

To test the idea of the hd being very defragmented, i copied a picture that was taking forever to open from my desktop, and placed a copy of it on my desktop. As i suspected, the picture still took a very long time to open, 8seconds for a 100k jpg. I placed this picure on a second harddrive, and opened it, and it opened instantaneously.

SO ha HA, eureka, My harddrive C: is pooched then right?..... NO

I re copied the same picture to c:\ instead of just on my desktop, and tried opening it, now it should have took like 8 seconds, but it opened instantly. So WTF! It takes 8seconds to load up on my desktop but go a few directories higher up to C:\ and it opens a picture up instantly.

So then i went back to my desktop, and again, it still took 8 seconds to open the file. So I did this. I created a new folder on my desktop and copied the picture into that folder. It opened right away! So then it must have something to do with other files located in the same folder. So i cleared up my desktop and moved everything into a folder except for that one 8 second picture. When i tried it, it opened instantly........ I also found this 8 second thing also happened in a different directory, so it wasnt just a "desktop" thing.

So then i went about removing each file on the desktop and opening up the picture to pin point what type of file and or files were causing this slow down in the picture viewer.


AMAZING RESULTS!!!

turns out i found out what was causing the slow down. On my desktop I had two links to exe files for games i had uninstalled. so they were dead links. As soon as these were gone, the picture opened up instantly. Ok, so what was slowing down the picture in the other folder? .... turns out i had a link to a network folder that was no longer active. remove this and every picture in that folder opens up instantly.


Conclusion:

When opening up a picture using Windows Picture and Fax Viewer, if there exists within that same directory a dead LNK file, this will cause some slow down with the application.

Why this occurs? Perhaps when loading the application, it first scans the directory to make a note of the available pictures for like a slide show purpose. When encountering a dead link, the program hangs for a period of time.

Give it a try, I bet this isnt just a localized case.
Click to expand...

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.
 
h41cyon said:
WEIRD,

Ok, i've done some more tests and the results are very interesting.

To test the idea of the hd being very defragmented, i copied a picture that was taking forever to open from my desktop, and placed a copy of it on my desktop. As i suspected, the picture still took a very long time to open, 8seconds for a 100k jpg. I placed this picure on a second harddrive, and opened it, and it opened instantaneously.

SO ha HA, eureka, My harddrive C: is pooched then right?..... NO

I re copied the same picture to c:\ instead of just on my desktop, and tried opening it, now it should have took like 8 seconds, but it opened instantly. So WTF! It takes 8seconds to load up on my desktop but go a few directories higher up to C:\ and it opens a picture up instantly.

So then i went back to my desktop, and again, it still took 8 seconds to open the file. So I did this. I created a new folder on my desktop and copied the picture into that folder. It opened right away! So then it must have something to do with other files located in the same folder. So i cleared up my desktop and moved everything into a folder except for that one 8 second picture. When i tried it, it opened instantly........ I also found this 8 second thing also happened in a different directory, so it wasnt just a "desktop" thing.

So then i went about removing each file on the desktop and opening up the picture to pin point what type of file and or files were causing this slow down in the picture viewer.


AMAZING RESULTS!!!

turns out i found out what was causing the slow down. On my desktop I had two links to exe files for games i had uninstalled. so they were dead links. As soon as these were gone, the picture opened up instantly. Ok, so what was slowing down the picture in the other folder? .... turns out i had a link to a network folder that was no longer active. remove this and every picture in that folder opens up instantly.


Conclusion:

When opening up a picture using Windows Picture and Fax Viewer, if there exists within that same directory a dead LNK file, this will cause some slow down with the application.

Why this occurs? Perhaps when loading the application, it first scans the directory to make a note of the available pictures for like a slide show purpose. When encountering a dead link, the program hangs for a period of time.

Give it a try, I bet this isnt just a localized case.
Click to expand...

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!
 
h41cyon said:
Not exactly. These images used to take only a short time to load, very quick.


My system:
athlon-xp mobile oc'ed to 2200mhz
1gig of pc3200 cas 2.5
7200 WD 120gig hd
geforce 6800


I really dont think its my system....
Click to expand...

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.
 
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