How can I speed up the viewing of folder with many video files

Question

Possible Duplicate:
Is there a way to increase how much is cached for thumbnail views of pictures?

I have a folder with many videos of my family and each time I open the folder I wait for windows to create thumbnails for hundreds of videos.

I would like to speed up the opening of the folder so I can see the files right away.

Answer 1

Your problem may be with the update mechanism of thumbnails, rather than with the cache size. The problem with Windows 7 is that when the folder is updated, it will insist on deleting and recreating the thumbnails for all the files in the folder.

There are two possible solutions to the problem.

First solution is to turn off thumbnails creation for that folder, so Windows will list the videos as simple files. The negative aspect here is that the videos will need to identified by file-name and/or date.

This approach is described in detail in the article Speed Up Windows 7 Folder Loading Time and involves : Go to Properties of the folder, Customize tab, and under Optimize this folder for set the content-type of the folder from the drop-down menu to Document, and hit OK.

Second solution involves monkeying with the folder-permission, in effect turning-off the permission to delete and recreate the thumbnail cache every time. This is described in the article Stop/Prevent Windows 7 From Deleting Thumbnail Cache. I remark that I have no idea how well this will work or what other complications it will cause, so I can take no responsibility for it.

Answer 2

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/w7itprogeneral/thread/9878f7db-57ff-409e-ac04-d7d678d2b629

More specifically:

http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=5227320&sid=5e46b97cf2343974e50114b9f3146f3a#p5227320

After surfing around, it seems that:

• Your problem is typical for Win7.
• There is no standard procedure to achieve what you need.

I presume that tweaking the registry keys in the second link could possibly help but I can't bet on it.

You could also try to decrease the size and quality of generated thumbnails in hope that more can be stored in thumbs.db.

Personally, I always disable thumbnails for performance reasons, so I haven't tested it myself.