this is a weird one... but then, this is me we're talking about here. 
So I basically have a folder full of 'junk' -- image macros, various photos, etc... downloaded from the web, or received from contacts, basically everything that cluttered up my desktop at one point but never had the time to do anything but dump it in the folder when it came time to clean it up.
The folder is maybe 95% images... 5000 or so images in all. And yes, I know Windows doesn't like that many in one place, which is part of the reason I'm trying to deal with it now.
I'm trying to select groups of images and either delete or sort them into various other folders on my PC based on content, etc... the problem is that I can't see what 4/5 of them are without opening them in picture and fax viewer.
Let's back up a little here...
Initially, I had them all showing at the standard thumbnail view, and everything appeared fine... problem was, they were too small to really make a judgment on their contents for effective sorting at a glance... so I used tweak UI and set the thumbnail size to 256. Again, everything appeared fine, and I went on like this for a while... until explorer crashed.
At that point I figured it would be a good time to turn the thumbnail sizes back down to somewhere in the middle, so they didn't take up so much screen space, and hopefully wouldn't crash explorer again. I set them to 192, and suddenly, everything ground to a halt.
What I get now is that only 1 in 5 image thumbnails show. If I'm sorting by filename, it appears random, but if I sort by date, they appear in groups... say for example, there will be 40 thumbnails together that are showing, then 160 that do not, another 40 that do, etc... I tried refreshing the view several times and restarting explorer, but it's still the same, and the same images do and don't show... I also tried deleting the thumbs.db file for the folder, then refreshing again, but the same result. Is windows caching them in memory or backing them up somewhere? I'm convinced that the thumbs.db file is corrupt and that's why I'm getting this, but if deleting the file won't purge the thumbnail cache, how can I get it to do that?
Hmm, I found I can reset them by booting into safe mode with command prompt, navigating to the folder, using "DEL /f /a thumbs.db", then rebooting again into regular... it will then build thumbnails normally, until you get to a certain point, then stops building them... I can work with this, since it gives me a large chunk at a time to sort through before needing to go through the whole refresh process again. I'm guessing the thumbs.db file just doesn't want to exceed a certain size in some aspect.
So I basically have a folder full of 'junk' -- image macros, various photos, etc... downloaded from the web, or received from contacts, basically everything that cluttered up my desktop at one point but never had the time to do anything but dump it in the folder when it came time to clean it up.
The folder is maybe 95% images... 5000 or so images in all. And yes, I know Windows doesn't like that many in one place, which is part of the reason I'm trying to deal with it now.
I'm trying to select groups of images and either delete or sort them into various other folders on my PC based on content, etc... the problem is that I can't see what 4/5 of them are without opening them in picture and fax viewer.
Let's back up a little here...
Initially, I had them all showing at the standard thumbnail view, and everything appeared fine... problem was, they were too small to really make a judgment on their contents for effective sorting at a glance... so I used tweak UI and set the thumbnail size to 256. Again, everything appeared fine, and I went on like this for a while... until explorer crashed.
At that point I figured it would be a good time to turn the thumbnail sizes back down to somewhere in the middle, so they didn't take up so much screen space, and hopefully wouldn't crash explorer again. I set them to 192, and suddenly, everything ground to a halt.
What I get now is that only 1 in 5 image thumbnails show. If I'm sorting by filename, it appears random, but if I sort by date, they appear in groups... say for example, there will be 40 thumbnails together that are showing, then 160 that do not, another 40 that do, etc... I tried refreshing the view several times and restarting explorer, but it's still the same, and the same images do and don't show... I also tried deleting the thumbs.db file for the folder, then refreshing again, but the same result. Is windows caching them in memory or backing them up somewhere? I'm convinced that the thumbs.db file is corrupt and that's why I'm getting this, but if deleting the file won't purge the thumbnail cache, how can I get it to do that?
Hmm, I found I can reset them by booting into safe mode with command prompt, navigating to the folder, using "DEL /f /a thumbs.db", then rebooting again into regular... it will then build thumbnails normally, until you get to a certain point, then stops building them... I can work with this, since it gives me a large chunk at a time to sort through before needing to go through the whole refresh process again. I'm guessing the thumbs.db file just doesn't want to exceed a certain size in some aspect.
