gallery thumbnails on windows 8 preview: not all are generated

Hi,

We need some pieces of information in order to isolate the possible cause of the problem. Please answer the following questions below:

1. Please verify if the issue happen to same photos every time you use Photo Gallery or it randomly occurs to any photos in your Photo Gallery.
2. What is the file format of the affected pictures?
3. Where are these photos located?
4. Are these pictures generated by your camera? If yes, please post the exact model.
   

Thank you.

Hi Leonard,

1) it seems that the thumbnails which were created at some point in time remain stable and do not disappear. The others that were never generated, remain as placeholders. It seems totally random which one is not generated.

The little clock icon in the status bar indicates e.g. 30000 thumbnail updates remaining. [30000 is just a sample. Each time Photo gallery is opened and a folder is clicked it changes.]

The number depends on how many folders I clicked before. However, it seems that this number then is not updated at all, so no updates are done.

2) all are jpg

3) it happens to "My Picures" folder on drive c: and also to the images located on my external USB 3.0 drive. It makes no difference where they are located.

4) All pictures come from cameras, but no specific brand or model. It happens to images from 5 year old cameras and to newest camera images. Altogether may be 10 different cameras and no pattern is recognizable.

MORE INFO:

most thumbnails that were generated some time in the past... are blurred. That type of blur which could be seen always for Live Photo Gallery when the thumbnail was generated BUT then it sharpened a second later. This does not happen any more.

I have this issue since I installed Win 8 preview. In general it seems that the thumbnail generating process which runs in the background somehow 'hangs'.

I have about 90k+ images and they were all displayed perfectly under WIN 7 -- I am aware it takes some time to generate all thumbnails but here under WIN 8 definitely nothing progresses. No restart of Photo Gallery, no boot, no nothing helps.

I deleted already the .pd6 file and it Photo Gallery started to recreate it but stops at a certain point in time. The file does not grow anymore in size, however, the date modified is always updated when Photo Gallery is accessed.

The 2nd issue I described [crash when opening the context  menu for an item and clicking COPY] happens for any item regardless whether a placeholder icon or generated thumbnail.

may be those info help to figure out the issue?

regards

frank

Hi Frank-S1,

For us to investigate the issue, please provide us screen shots of the thumbnails and log files for Photo Gallery issues. I have sent you a private message for the instructions. After uploading the files, please notify us in this thread.

Thanks!

Hi,

thanks for offering your assistance.

Over the weekend I did a 'last' attempt to solve the issue and -kind of unbelievable -- it worked.

I (once again) deleted the .pd6 database file and closed ALL other applications and apps I have normally running on my system parallel: Among them: IE10, Firefox, Live Mail 2012, Visual Studio 2010, Adobe Photoshop, Outlook 2013 Preview , OneNote.

Then I opened Photo Gallery and it started creating the fresh .pd6 file. So far nothing that wouldn't have worked before. The mentioned clock icon in the Status bar came back after a while and indicated that Tags and Thumbnails were counting up. That also worked before but the difference this time was that after the thumbnail counter reached the number of images in my library it then actually started to count down and created those thumbnails. BEFORE that process did not start or stopped after a few thumbnails and the ones that were visible were blurred. I guess the thumbnail creation is a 2-phase process and phase 1 sometimes worked for a few images but phase-2 (sharpening and finalizing the thumbnail) never started.

Altogether Photo Gallery had to create 102 Thousand thumbnails and it ran through, flawless. After that was done the previously blurred thumbnails were sharp.

Additionally, I can now right-click thumbnails, and hit COPY without crashing Photo Gallery. That was not possible before.

So, what is the conclusion: something must have interfered with the thumbnail creating process. May be one of the open applications. Unfortunately I don't have a complete list of what was running before. It was never a memory issue since my system was running on not more than 50-60% of capacity. This time I did not reboot, just closed the applications and ran Photo Gallery w/o having any other program active. Interesting-wise, afterwards I opened IE10 & Outlook during the creation process and it did not disturb the process. Bottom-line, I don't really know what the cause of the problem was. I just know that I had tried to delete .pd6 before and started the thumbnail generation process before but it never worked,...