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What OS X program handles displaying tons of pictures as well as Windows Explorer?

W

Wolfpup

macrumors 68030
Original poster
Sep 7, 2006
2,948
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I'm trying to find potential replacements for various Windows programs, and have hit a snag here so far (I'm testing them on an older Mac).

XP's Windows Explorer handles huge directories of image files, displaying them as largeish thumbnails pretty fast. I think it "cheats" by only actually displaying what's on screen at the time, rather than trying to load everything at once. (It's pretty fast even if you disable caching thumbnails.)

Anyway, I can't find a replacement for that for OS X. Finder doesn't do thumbnails like Explorer, and every program I've tried is WAAAAAAAAAAAAAY too slow to be practical. I've notably NOT tried iPhoto, as I don't have it (or at least not a current copy-might have some version 1 copy somewhere).

I've tried Preview, Graphic Converter, Seashore, Carbonviewer (I think that's what it's called) and some others. They're all way, way too slow to actually work.

This is completely weird, but...is there a replacement for Windows Explorer?
 
How fast is the PC that you're testing it on? You said it was an older Mac, so it might be an unfair comparison. And have you tried Finder? You can set the size of the thumbnail shown by pressing command (apple) + J and then dragging the icon size slider over to the right.
 
Okay, I'm totally embarrassed. I didn't know Finder could show a thumbnail!
Thank's so much! You didn't even make fun of me :D

It's still slow, but yeah, this is a slow machine, and it is many, many orders of magnitude faster than Graphic Converter was doing. I'll play around with this some more. Hopefully it's good enough.

Does Finder cache thumbnails? That might speed stuff up in the future.

Really weird-I discovered root_process or something like that (whatever process 0 is called) was using up a ton of CPU time after copying the files over. Turns out it was Norton's antivirus. I disabled it temporarily, but I'm not sure if it would settle down once it's finished scanning the new files or not.
 
Eidorian said:
Finder does cache thumbnails but if Finder is relaunched it does it all over again.
Click to expand...

You mean like if it's force quit or something like that? I tried rebooting, and the files are still displayed fast.

This is really great! Thanks again! I can't believe how much faster Finder renders image than the image related programs. Night and day difference. I mean it must do it something like 1000 times faster, literally.
 
Wolfpup said:
You mean like if it's force quit or something like that? I tried rebooting, and the files are still displayed fast.

This is really great! Thanks again! I can't believe how much faster Finder renders image than the image related programs. Night and day difference. I mean it must do it something like 1000 times faster, literally.
Click to expand...
To the best of my knowledge it does have to be a force quit or Finder crash.
 
I guess that makes sense-like they're assuming it could be a corruption in those files that caused the crash, or just that it might be out of date since Finder didn't exit gracefully.

Anyway this old Mac I tested it on it fast enough in the Finder to be usable-and a new Mac would be a trillion times faster, so this definitely works.

I don't understand why Finder (and Explorer) are so much faster than other programs! But I'm glad.

Thanks so much for the help! I still feel so silly for not knowing Finder could display thumbnail images. I blew them up a bit and it looks pretty much just like Explorer :)
 
It's a major feature that people easily over look all the time. I know people that are about to give up on OS X just because of it. Tis a silly thing.
 
What I do in my Pictures folder (and subfolders) is enable the icon preview, and make icons as big as possible (128x128). Give just those settings to any folders you have with pics (for me, inc. the desktop), and you have a snazzy pictures folder, with the rest of the finder remaining however you like it.
 
I agree that the Windows Explorer does have a good way to view pictures and I'm looking forward to Leopards Coverflow to become competitive in this feature. This is one of several cases where I think Windows wins.
 
I forgot about Coverflow. I hope that runs well with hundreds/thousands of files. I could see that running a lot worse than the thumbnail feature does now.

Functionally it seems like it would be similar to Windows' "filmstrip" view.
 
This isn't entirely the same issue, but it is related. One thing some people forget about a lot is that Preview can open many files at once. I heard a girl last week complaining that to look through photos in a directory on OS X, she had to open them one at a time. Not true; select all the ones you want to open, and then press Command+O (assuming it will default to opening in Preview like normal). You will then have all the photos open in one Preview window and can quickly page through them with the arrow keys.
 
mrogers said:
This isn't entirely the same issue, but it is related. One thing some people forget about a lot is that Preview can open many files at once. I heard a girl last week complaining that to look through photos in a directory on OS X, she had to open them one at a time. Not true; select all the ones you want to open, and then press Command+O (assuming it will default to opening in Preview like normal). You will then have all the photos open in one Preview window and can quickly page through them with the arrow keys.
Click to expand...

I guess. That method isn't exactly efficient. I'd rather just open one picture and flip through all the pics in that folder rather than have to load up a bunch of pics. Xee is a decent program that does this, which is worth a shot. Graphic Converter would have been my first suggestion/choice but the OP says that didn't satisfy him, so oh well.
 
mrogers said:
This isn't entirely the same issue, but it is related. One thing some people forget about a lot is that Preview can open many files at once. I heard a girl last week complaining that to look through photos in a directory on OS X, she had to open them one at a time. Not true; select all the ones you want to open, and then press Command+O (assuming it will default to opening in Preview like normal). You will then have all the photos open in one Preview window and can quickly page through them with the arrow keys.
Click to expand...

As was mentioned, that's annoying and not practical for large numbers of files. And for REALLY large numbers of files Preview is far, far too slow.

GimmeSlack12 said:
I guess. That method isn't exactly efficient. I'd rather just open one picture and flip through all the pics in that folder rather than have to load up a bunch of pics. Xee is a decent program that does this, which is worth a shot. Graphic Converter would have been my first suggestion/choice but the OP says that didn't satisfy him, so oh well.
Click to expand...

I'll give that Xee a shot, I hadn't heard of that.

Graphic Converter is way, way, way too slow to handle this, though Finder seems pretty solid now that I know it can do thumbnails :)
 
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