Why are image thumbnails such a struggle?

B

Boomy

Registered
You know for an OS that is supposedly so good for multimedia, why can't it show image thumbnails? Yeah it can show about a dozen, but any folder with more than that just doesn't display all the thumbnails. They just don't show up. It's like it takes so much resources just to draw up the thumbnails. What's up with that. I use Ubuntu on my PC and it is awesome for browsing through folders with hundreds of images. I can even zoom in on them and have huge, detailed thumbnails of all my pics. In seconds. Browsing through images with OSX is a major pita. I am running 10.3.9. Is Tiger any better? Right now it is laughable and I expected something this simple to work much better.
 
Thanks for the suggestion, but it requires Tiger. I just want to view thumbs in the Finder, like when I upload photos to ebay or whatever. I don't want to have to open another app to do a simple task. I'm just curious how an OS that touts it self as being the leader in "pictures, video, you know fun stuff like that" according to the TV commercials with the "cool" Mac guy and the clueless PC dork cannot perform the simple task of displaying thumbnails without a third party app. It blows me away. I mean Windows and Linux both do it flawlessly. What gives?
 
It all depends on what created the images. "Foreign" images don't necessarily have a preview image attached. They're optionally created when you use something like Photoshop. I've never seen it as an issue.

Imagebrowser is pretty cool if you can use it. It creates thumbnails of all the images in a folder if you enable that in its preferences. It does mean lots of extra images, a thumb for each image but they can be easily tossed since they're either created in a subfolder or in one you define.

In any case if you click on an image you should see a Preview though. I do, at least with 10.4.X.
 
I mean thumbnails when I open the folder. When I click on it, I do get a preview, but when I'm trying to locate a file in a folder with 100 photos, it's not practical to search by clicking on each one.

mac.jpg



linux.jpg



linux2.jpg
 
Open/import the folder in iPhoto. You'll get what you want.

I don't use iPhoto much but I'm guessing Apple expects you to when you want something like that.
 
It also looks like you have some application installed that is claiming the JPG extension and possibly setting an icon with a specific creator code on those images. In the screenshots you provided it looks like the "vanilla" jpegs are getting thumbnails just fine. I would not be surprised if a application explicitly setting the icon for a file or fiddling with the creator codes could have that effect.
 
I have to agree with lurk. It looked as though some of the images were associated to a particular program and wouldn't let it display the thumbnail properly, while the others that weren't associated with that particular application were able to.
 
I have jpegs associated with the program "xee". Before I had them associated with "preview", but I still had the same problem. I got this computer second hand, so I'm not sure what the default program is to open jpegs. I needed something i could use to switch quickly between photos so I chose Xee as it was the only one I could find with arrows for switching between photos.

All the jpegs are associated with Xee, I don't know why there are different icons for them. And eventually they will all show up as thumbnials, but it is very slow. I have to scroll down and wait a few minutes, scroll again and wait some more. Right now it is drawing up thumbs and slowing the whole machine down so much that I'm having trouble typing. It is a G3 700mhz iBook with 384Mb of ram. I know they are slow, but damn....Megahertz myth is a myth itself...
 
Usually, it's Preview that's set to default. Also remember that 384 MB of RAM on a G3 iBook is enough to run Mac OS X, but it's going to run slowly. You'll need a lot more memory than that, especially if it's a newer version of Mac OS X like Tiger or even Panther (which is what you're running). The recommended memory size for Panther to be usable is 512 MB. I've run Panther on a 600 MHz G3 iMac running with 256 MB of RAM and while it met the requirements, it did so VERY slowly.
 
Thanks for your input. I do plan to upgrade the ram in the near future, I hope it will make a difference.
 
It will. Those are also huge photos (That is a good thing) but one of those 2560x1920 images might be about a megabyte compressed on the disk it takes about 20 MB to hold it in memory. Then the machine has to compute the thumbnail and save that back to the file. Another way of thinking about it is that one of those pictures uses up 5% of your memory and pulling 100 of them through the system will be rough. Adding memory will make a huge difference!
 
I agree with Boomy on this one! This is a thing definitely solved much better on a PC (I am not familiar with Lynux). Because to Preview any pictures, I have to select files and drop them to Preview. And then it is not really possible to delete files from there.

And why do I even NEED to open another program for this? For one job (lasted a week) I had about 500 photos daily, needed to make a selection and edit and write captions. Always opening files with another program is a pain in the ass. I tried working with Adobe Bridge but it soo slow compared to PC thumbnail.
Working with a PC showed for easier/faster (because of thumbnail/filmstrip options).

And iPhoto is a NONO, definitely your foe if you are seriously photographer - it duplicates files, makes them smaller etc.etc. without you really knowing it.. plus finding the REAL files if you want to do anything with them is a pain in the ass! iPhoto has been permanently deleted from my mac very soon.
 
I waited for all the thumbnails to draw up in a folder and I figured they would be in cache so I wouldn't have to do it again, but upon rebooting the machine they are all gone. This is retarded, I expected so much more for what is supposedly a multimedia geared OS.
 
Unfortunately this is one of the things that Linux and even Windows (Blergh) does way better than Mac OSX, as OSX doesn't appear to cache it's file icons, and seems to chug whenn it DOES redraw them (each time).

It's been something that's frustrated me whenever I see how well it work kon the other two platforms. I wish Apple would polish the small stuff sometimes, rather than going for the "Big Wow" first.
 
JeffCGD said:
Unfortunately this is one of the things that Linux and even Windows (Blergh) does way better than Mac OSX, as OSX doesn't appear to cache it's file icons, and seems to chug whenn it DOES redraw them (each time).
Click to expand...

Since you're running 10.4 you can use ImageBrowser. It's quite nice in how it handles thumbnails.

http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/15033

I connect to Linux web servers via WebDAV and it can also create thumbs of the images stored on them which is very convenient.
 
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