ACDSee 6.0

It also allows you to organize your collections and it is the best damned image viewer ever.

I have a collection of around 400,000+ images and its a great piece of software. Some of my directories before organization contained upwards of 25,000+ pictures.

With version 6 there's even a plugin that finds Exact duplicate images and allows you to delete them.
Great!

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Version 5 and version 6 were so much better at looking at dirs with lots of pix.

How many thumbnails are you trying to look at-a-time?

Here's the thing I've noticed regarding thos dirs with 5000+ images. It is not ACDSee's fault that it takes a long time before it starts displaying the images.

From what I understand the FileSystem is what's causing the problem. The fileSystem just wasn't meant to handle displaying all these files in one Directory.

You probably also notice if you try to goto the directory in Windows Explorer it also takes a hella long time to open as well.

Ahh the database corruption issue. I remeber there is a way to disable the catalog files.
This forces ACDSee to recreate the thumbnails...
This is both a positive and a negative.
ACDSee's thumbnail priority is where you currently are.. then it starts back at the top and works its way down.
You save yourself the hard drive space... and fragmentation issues by not having a catalog file.

But you loose the optimizaiton of having your thumbnails appear quicker.

Hmm dilema. now if you move your file.. acdsee has the thumbnail but not the new location.. bummer!
You have to use ACDSee's optimize database function..

Ways to speed up thumbnail generation.
Get Rid of all overlay icons.
And probably turn off image dimensions..

Less information to display.. the faster it will show.
I usually keep filename displayed. but of course its upto you.
You can also reduce the size of your thumbnails..
I kind of prefer the 12 hex 90 or larger sizes..

Alternatively..
you can have another hard drive dedicated to the catalog file.
you say you have a 15000 RPM drive is it SCSI?
YOu can get yourself a relatively cheap 9.1gig 15Krpm scsi drive and have it be dedicated to only your catalog file.. and you might as well through your pagefile on there as well.. or get another 9.1gig drive just for your page file..

Not that it matters now... and I'll belive it when I see it..
Microsoft is developing a new File System for its next generation of Windows.. it is supposed to be much much faster than the current file systems. .. WinFS
BIll probably downloaded like 10 billion pornos and needs to see the directories quicker!
If it really delivers.. then we may see a good performance increase when accessing directories with 10K or more files..

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Looking at the MS website Change MFT Zone Size

It suggests increasing the MFT for storage of many smaller files 2k-7k.
Are you extrapolating that given large numbers of files per directory would be better served with a larger MFT?

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This article looks very familiar. I think I may have done some of these tricks on my Win2K machine to improve the file system performance...
you may want to search google for more NTFS optimizations...

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I wish ACDSee could create better galleries for the web.

-- Snowman

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"In Windows NT (with SP6) and above you can control how much space for the MFT (Master File Table) is reserved.

For each file and folder NTFS uses, an entry is created inside the MFT. This allows NTFS to located the objects very fast.

However, only a MFT that is in one block is really fast. If you copy many small images to this computer, the normal MFT space is properly to small, so the MFT is continued on a different location on the hard disk.

This is not a problem because the computer still works, but any request to a file takes much longer because now NTFS needs to seek for two MFT "block" and reads both (for every file access!). In this example, a big MFT would be a good idea so it is keeped in one block.

On the other hand, if you only have some very huge database files on this computer, a huge MFT is not a good idea since every file request takes longer than needed (the MFT is allways read completely). That's because there are only few files on the disk and the MFT could be small.

Unfortunately, Microsoft didn't specifies this setting in detail, so the only chance is to play around with this settings and check the performance of the computer after you have changed this setting "

[Link]

"In Windows NT (with SP6) and above you can control how much space for the MFT (Master File Table) is reserved.

For each file and folder NTFS uses, an entry is created inside the MFT. This allows NTFS to located the objects very fast.

However, only a MFT that is in one block is really fast. If you copy many small images to this computer, the normal MFT space is properly to small, so the MFT is continued on a different location on the hard disk.

This is not a problem because the computer still works, but any request to a file takes much longer because now NTFS needs to seek for two MFT "block" and reads both (for every file access!). In this example, a big MFT would be a good idea so it is keeped in one block.

On the other hand, if you only have some very huge database files on this computer, a huge MFT is not a good idea since every file request takes longer than needed (the MFT is allways read completely). That's because there are only few files on the disk and the MFT could be small.

Unfortunately, Microsoft didn't specifies this setting in detail, so the only chance is to play around with this settings and check the performance of the computer after you have changed this setting "

[Link]