Anytime I plug in my flash card from my camera to look at some pictures, Vista has to do some kind of gigantic meta-indexing or something - evidenced by that green bar moving across the top. During this time I cannot sort the pictures, which means I can't just grab the 2 or 3 I just took and be on my way. I have to wait for the green bar to finish whatever the hell it's doing.

This happens even if I only have the view set to Details and not Thumbnails. Furthermore sometimes it seems to get exponentially slower as it gets to the end. And then just when you think it's finally done, it freaking goes into the blue where the little X button is, continuing to get exponentially slower of course. Also in true Windows fashion sometimes it takes 10 seconds, sometimes it takes 10 minutes.



Anyone know what this thing is doing, or a way to disable it? In the old days you could turn off FindFast and eliminate a lot of this kind of stuff. Is there some Vista equivalent?

http://www.ditii.com/2007/09/17/wind...bnail-preview/

Ok well with some digging it looks like Vista always tries to do the thumbnail preview, even if you have the View set to Details. You can disable this by setting 'Always show icons, never thumbnails' in your Folder Options. But then you lose thumbnails altogether, for every folder and drive. I don't want that, they come in handy a lot. I just don't want it re-scanning my flash drive from scratch every time. Ugh.

You might start thinking about your photo work flow, there are some changes you can make to that which might help a little. Things like archiving your pictures on a computer and CD/DVD then erasing and reformatting the flash card so that you aren't always reindexing the whole card. You might also look into getting a faster flash card.

I just leave the old photos on there as a 3rd backup in case my external HD and computer HD get massive power surged or something. But then I delete them whenever I go on my next trip and need the space. Btw all these photos are from a recent trip. But duh, I can just put them in another folder so I don't have to deal with them when I take a few new pics!

Hint: They have these new things called CD burners.

----------Kitty