New feature request: fast thumbnails preloading for user selected folders

[arturdd]

Description of the new feature / enhancement

User right clicks on the folder in the Explorer & select option "preload thumbnails" from the context menu. After that, a one time process start & thumbnails are generated for each file in the folder, with 100% CPU/GPU power.

Scenario when this would be used?

Right now, wen user opens folder, full of images and videos, thumbnails are generated in the background, only for files currently visible on the screen. For folders with thousands of files, it takes a lot of time to find the right file - when there are no thumbnails yet. Especially for images formats like .HEIC (gaining popularity) it takes forever to generate thumbnails, as extension for this file type it's extremely slow. Pre-generating thumbnails with a full CPU/GPU power, would help a lot for professionals working with large multimedia folders.

Supporting information

There is a tool on the web, with similar functionality (MIT License), but it appears the project is no longer in the active development. https://github.com/bruhov/WinThumbsPreloader there are forks, that adds multi threading for faster .heic generation but these are buggy.

[arya-coding]

That would be great !

[solstice-r]

Seems like there is a more maintained fork under the same license, would still be neat to see this integrated into PowerToys though: https://github.com/Mfarooq360/WinThumbsPreloader

[yevon]

Pretty much needed! This would be amazing to be done by windows in background for new files when pc is in IDLE, quite annoying having to wait for thumbnail generation for videos and images

[yevon]

Seems like there is a more maintained fork under the same license, would still be neat to see this integrated into PowerToys though: https://github.com/Mfarooq360/WinThumbsPreloader

I'm not really sure if those generated thumbnails are working with latest windows 11 explorer gallery and photos app.

[krashd8]

Pretty much needed! This would be amazing to be done by windows in background for new files when pc is in IDLE, quite annoying having to wait for thumbnail generation for videos and images

The problem with that though is that on most people's computers there are tens of thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of images and short movies in the system folders of all of your apps and games and the operating system itself and if Windows were to create thumbnails of all of them it would take up a very large chunk of disk space. Windows has no way of knowing which folders you want to have thumbnails for and which folders you don't.

Though they really should do what you suggested with the obvious folders like Documents/Pictures and Documents/Videos

[yevon]

Pretty much needed! This would be amazing to be done by windows in background for new files when pc is in IDLE, quite annoying having to wait for thumbnail generation for videos and images

The problem with that though is that on most people's computers there are tens of thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of images and short movies in the system folders of all of your apps and games and the operating system itself and if Windows were to create thumbnails of all of them it would take up a very large chunk of disk space. Windows has no way of knowing which folders you want to have thumbnails for and which folders you don't.

Though they really should do what you suggested with the obvious folders like Documents/Pictures and Documents/Videos

Yes, with the new windows 11 22H2 gallery they could know that and generate thumbnails in background, the photos app and the explorer they share the same collection of images. It's quite surprising seeing your android phone blazing fast scrolling through thousands of photos, and the windows 11 gallery or photos app generating thumbnails super slow in a machine with a ryzen 7950x and a nvidia 4090. Also very buggy scrolling, with black zones that never fullfil with images, or even tooltips outside of the explorer windows, feels super laggy. It will be eventually be fixed, surprised this low level of performance of the 22h2 release on that regard in the new gallery. Image generation feels very slow even on single thread, it could be considered super slow even on a mobile phone, and it could also take profit of having a 16 core processor connected to the grid, not a battery with energy savings in place. A bit of spam, but also whatsapp desktop for windows is super laggy, seconds to load conversations, keyboard lag when typing or unable to type at all. Those two small things make the use of windows 11 look not so good.

[bionicles]

throwing this out there : i have a 24 core cpu and an nvidia rtx 4090 that can run crysis, but for some reason i need to wait around for a cache update to show a simple image thumbnail, just curious what's the deal here,

how does the thumbnail process in windows 11 actually work? it seems like something which is a straightforward linear algebra transform and not anything which requires delay or caching. are we FIFO or LIFO? I certainly tend to look at most recent screenshots first!

i thought "cache invalidation" was one of the hardest parts of computer science, and the "bitter lesson" is just to throw more compute at our problems, so could anyone enlighten me as to how we can gpu accelerate file explorer so this never happens ? it's an honest dealbreaker, i don't care about copilots, i just want the basic stuff to actually work

[yevon]

Windows should have a native and shared api for generating and showing images and thumbnails as mobile os do. Windows 11 23H2 gallery is completely broken even today. Just try to scroll fast through a big image gallery, the explorer.exe process just grows leaking memory everywhere until it explodes and hangs.

[Mentatt76]

I have over 15K photos in my Pictures folder and this app did a great job preloading thumbs. However, I have realized that after preloading, folder views are reset and now all I'm looking to yellow folders with tiny "JPG"1 icon in the center. No folder previews .. so how to fix it?

[VL4DST3R]

Bump in hopes of raising awareness as this is a very big pain-point for me and clearly a lot of other people. WinThumbsPreloader works most of the time but still has some issues and inconsistencies like the guy above mentioned. Having this built into PowerToys with better integration would be wonderful!

[yevon]

This should be natively implemented in windows across all applications, with thumbnails pregeneration and global cache like mobile phones do. And please, fix the new windows explorer gallery, leaks memory until explodes still today!

[VL4DST3R]

Windows should also handle network mounts without locking up the entire explorer when unavailable but let's be realistic here- all of these are not new issues. MS never cared enough to even acknowledge any of them, never mind fix. PowerToys is the best and only thing we got in addressing windows shortcomings, with a team of devs and contributors who actually care about a better user experience.

[Xanph]

Would be a massive help for data science. I'm sifting through a small scale dataset with 30k images making tweaks and trying to notice small patterns that need to be removed. When scrolling in full screen mode there's lots of flickering as the files load off from an ssd