What methods exist to speed up thumbnail loading in File Explorer?
What methods exist to speed up thumbnail loading in File Explorer?
Windows 11 Home, version 23H2
When I open a folder of images and select the Large Icons view, the thumbnails load extremely slowly. For instance, a folder containing 77 JPEG images (most under 300K) takes about three minutes to display all the thumbnails. Once loaded, they are saved in the thumbs.db file within that folder; thus, the next time they appear, they appear instantly.
Prior to Windows 11, I used Windows 7 Pro. A similar folder would load all thumbnail images in two to three seconds at most. This suggests the slow performance is specific to Windows 11.
I attempted using WinThumbsPreloader, but it didn’t help for files stored on an external drive (my setup uses one). Even if it had worked, it wouldn’t have been ideal since I rely on commercial Photoshop and manage client folders with nearly 10,000 images. It would have been a huge relief if thumbnails loaded quickly in W11 as they did in W7.
Any suggestions?
Is there one partition on the SSD? How much space does it occupy?
it is only slow when the image is on an external drive?
does it function properly if you moved it to your c drive?
I just moved a folder to the C: drive and encountered the same issue, with very slow loading of thumbnails.
open the task manager while working, observe additional resource usage
There are no other processes using significant resources besides the task manager (<1%). The file explorer uses between 0% and 3% of CPU, mainly at the lower end of that range (<1%). Overall CPU stays under 4%. It briefly exceeded 20% but then returned to normal.
RAM stays consistent at 32%. Disk shows 0%, with occasional brief readings of 1%.