Thumbnail speed

Thumbnail speed

I take a good deal of photos; it's not uncommon for me to return home after some sort of event with several hundred pictures. Since my camera only has USB 1.1, I use the removable CF card for transfer to the computer; I typically transfer the entire contents of the CF and then browse the images on the harddrive.

But Nautilus and GThumb are so darn slow that it can make a grown man (me) cry: Opening a folder with, say, 100 images can take minutes (!) om my 1GHz machine before all image thumbnails are loaded. That's just not good enough; virtually all "decent" image viewers on Windows beat the living s* out of their Linux equivalents: Opening the same folder takes seconds.

Yes, I do realize that if I edit the image and use an app smart enough to leave the thumbnail alone, but dumb enough to not update it, then there's a mismatch between thumbnail and image. Well, then that's a bug in the app generating the revised image file, and we need to help the author fix it.

So: If there's a thumbnail in a file, *use it*! And I don't care if it's of less resolution than Nautilus/GThumb/whatever deems appropriate. The user experience is king, and for someone like me speed is more important than quality (for thumbnails, not images, of course).

Regards,

/eskild.