Best Digital Camera 2014: 2013-08-18

Sabtu, 24 Agustus 2013

5,000 files in one folder Keeps freezing Windows?

Q. I have taken photos over a period of 6 years.. and ive put them all in one folder..

I have 1.12 GB (1,206,584,242 bytes) of total data in one folder with four sub folders but it has over 90% of the pictures in the root folder of E:\photos\Digital Camera\ <--- theres at least 5,000 files there.

Now when I go into the folder to view files... explorer.exe takes 99% of system resource and never loads anymore... I want to be able to save my files. .but I Dont know what to do.. am I going to have to Delete the folder permanently and loose everything? I have tried folder options with "Do not cache thumbnails" Both on and off.. and nither works.. I have even disabled "Auto search NEtwork Drives and folders"

This is Windows XP SP3 Professional.

Please any help would be appreciated,
Thanks in advance.
im sorry when I said "I have even disabled "Auto Search networks and folders" I meant to actually say - "Automatically search for network folders and printers. " I heard disabling that helps with search times in the folders of explorer.exe to speed things up..
Thanks guys all your feedback was very helpful, Special thanks to TJ and , Ramblin' Man, Also Ramblin' Man I did have one video that was being thumbnailed and it was a corrupted file too. I deleted it. Ive already started archving and the indexing speeds is increasing very well. Thnx to all ur help.

A. In XP (either FAT32 or NTFS formats for where your pictures are stored) there's an inherent catch that affects most all operating systems - I'll try to explain...

Imagine if you will your photos were in a book (ie: scrapbook) and that at the start of the book there's a table of contents which indicates not only how MANY pages there are (in your case, each photo is a page in this index) but also the date(s) regarding the page, the size of the content and so forth.

The catch here is that the more files you dump into a single directory, the longer it takes for these "table of content" pages to be created.

The old "rule of thumb" is 512 files per directory. Once this line is crossed, you're going to reserve and use more and more system resources to gather the TOC (table of contents) and the more resources that get spent doing this, the less resources there are to DO this job.

Note: Windows 7/8 still have this flaw -- it's not anything YOU have done, yourself.

You noted there's roughly six years worth of images in this one location. Here's what I would recommend...

1. Create a new folder on the SAME drive called something like "Sorted Photos"
2. Within this new folder, create additional folders specific to the YEAR in which the images were taken (ie: 2013, 2012, etc.)
3. This will be painfully slow at first, but open your drive (My Computer > Storage Drive) and do an ADVANCED SEARCH (Press CTRL + F for "Find" and on the left menu of the Find dialog select FILES AND FOLDERS and under advanced features, choose a date range of say, 01-01-2012 through 12-31-2012 and then run the search) Once all the images for that year have been searched for, press <ALT> + <E> and the letter "A" (ALT+E opens the main menu under EDIT, then "A" selects "Select All") and then press <CTRL>+<X> to CUT these images. Go into your new folder under that year and press <CTRL>+<V> to paste them into the new location.
4. Once you've done this for a year or two worth of images, the indexing and search speeds will increase dramatically. Repeat as necessary for all images in the old folder.

Now... once you have them sorted by YEAR, it wouldn't be a bad idea to repeat this process by MONTH which will very likely help index and organize your photos even more so.

The way we do this here is even more elaborate - we take photos and other content and embed them into databases which allows me to add captions/notes, compress the images so that they do not take up nearly a fraction of the drive space and thus I can burn them onto CD or DVD with ease AND still maintain the original image quality. This takes a bit of effort and my software is in-house written and likely further than you want to go at this point, but there are truly endless possibilities how to organize your media while making it painless for both you as well as your machine.

* If you're not revisiting your older images very often, I'd also strongly recommend archiving them. The way we do this here (which maintains protection) is by first creating a zip like archive (RAR format - see link below) which compresses BMP, JPEG and other image formats wonderfully, and then take the images AND the RAR file and burn them onto CD or DVD - two sets are created in case one gets damaged. Once accomplished, they can then be physically removed from the computer and your images are safe... and they're not hurting your computer's efficiency.

** If your machine doesn't want to work WITH you regarding getting these images cleaned up and reorganized, drop me an email and I can design a quick application to do so for you which will basically achieve what was listed above with the least amount of effort (assuming the date-stamps on the files are remotely accurate) - if so, drop me an email here at CentralWare [at] yahoo.com

Good luck and hope this helps!

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