As many of us know, storing large .TIF and .PSD files on external hard drives can result in slow and arduous searching, even on a fast machine. I'm talking about large format film scans, where each file goes from 150MB to 1 GB or more.
For whatever reason, the programs I have used for perusing these images, sit around generating thumbnails, for each directory you try to view - just when you want to see the contents of the directory. In software engineer parlance, that's called "lazy initialization", and while it may make sense to someone trying to conserve resources, it's annoying for the user. (Perhaps their target audience are users with lots of 2 MB JPG files.)
In refreshing contrast, Picasa blasts through these large collections of big files, and lets you browse through thumbnails at a very good pace. Why ? because Picasa generates its own thumbnails, when you first set it up, and it runs a background task which continues to refresh that library, whenever you insert/update/delete and image. Unlike some programs, it leaves your original file structure alone, and whatever metadata it uses, it maintains separately. If you shut it down, it automatically catches up and updates its own metadata in background, when you start it up again. In software parlance, that's called multi-threading, and it's a more effective solution.
Just to be clear: I don't use Picasa for photo editing - just as a fast file browser.
Picasa runs circles around Adobe Bridge - but if you know of something better or faster than Picasa, please share it with the rest of us !
See http://picasa.google.com
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