pictures taking AGES to open

This has been bugging me for at least a year now, I draw so I look at pictures I've saved for ideas from time to time.

It pretty much only happens in a certain folder, the one I save all my references and inspiration in. Which is very annoying. Moving the pictures helps, but only for a very short time.

I am on windows XP SP2
mobile pentium 4
1gb of ram

any help would be very appreciated! thanks!

 

Do you use the Thumbnails view of your pictures when choosing which you want to open?

Large file-size pictures take longer to be displayed as Thumbnails and longer to open. If you have a lot of large file-size pictures in the one folder and try to open one or more at the same time, it can be very slow.

If that's the case, try this:

Make sub-folders in your picture folder.
Split up the pictures so that you have fewer in each folder.
New pictures get put in new subfolders.
Test if speed of opening the pictures changes if you don't add more pictures to the various folders.

I sometimes have about 100 photos of between 670kb and 730kb in the same folder and the time delay to display them is awful. After I split them up into separate folders by date taken, the time delay is much less of an issue.