[Kempniu]

Greetings,

When I asked about my problem with slow thumbnail generation for high-resolution images, jmarshall explained to me (just as he did elsewhere before) that EXIF thumbnails are not used because their resolution is to small (160x120). But to be honest, when I have 500+ pictures in a folder and I want to quickly find a specific picture while a single thumbnail is generated every second, it's quite a pain in the neck. IMHO it would be fair to allow the user to force XBMC to use low-resolution thumbnails (or display an EXIF thumbnail first and then start generating prettier thumbnails in the background).

I just wanted to raise this issue on the feature request forum before posting an official feature request via Trac. Maybe I am missing something here, but from my point of view not giving the user an option to use lower resolution images may be unfair towards low-end hardware users.

[Robotica]

I think it is a smart solution for scrolling through large collections of pics. But I'm not sure how teamXBMC will handle future-requests like this. They aren't really interested in the picture library so far.

So solexalex made an addon providing many needed features for the picture database. See: http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=80845

[jmarshall]

I believe there's an ifdef sitting in cximage that allows this. I wouldn't necessarily be opposed to someone making that into an advancedsetting.

Note that getting some situation where the thumbs are "upgraded" would be a bit trickier however. I'm happy (as always) to provide pointers on this to a dev willing to take a look.

Cheers,
Jonathan

[Kempniu]

I've found some time to work on this issue. I've managed to create a simple patch that introduces a new boolean advanced setting - useexifthumbnails. As you might guess, turning it on forces XBMC to use EXIF thumbnails for thumbnail generation despite their low resolution. My XBMC installation has been stable with this patch applied, yet it probably needs some testing due to my lack of expertise in XBMC's source code.

[Anastrophe]

nice one

[Robotica]

I've tested this patch on Linux (with libjpeg-turbo) and it works. I like it! Would be great if better thumbs are shown as soon as the whole directory is listed.

[Kempniu]

As jmarshall originally pointed out, that would be tricky, i.e. it would require far more work than just changing an ifdef into a function argument Maybe I'll dig into the code some time in the future, but not in the upcoming days for sure.

I'm glad the patch works, though.

[Robotica]

Yeah, I've read that. No problem because, for now, I prefer speed over better thumbs.

ps.
I've added a link to this topic in the general "Picture improvement" topic: http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=113290

For anyone who's interested there are some (non-confirmed)bugs in that topic. Maybe you can give some feedback....