Hello everyone, I wasn't sure where to post this question as I'm not sure what the problem is. I've got a weird thing happening with some displays of thumbnails for jpg files in some file BROWSERS where the thumb doesn't show up, or it paints a portion of it (from the top) and then stops. As far as I can see, it is always when the picture is rotated according to the exif flag, having taken it with the camera in portrait orientation. It is intermittent, and is only a proportion of those rotated pics - most show up fine.

The background to this is a lot of testing of explorer replacements, many of which were pretty poor and had to be uninstalled again. I was fairly careful about restarts and made a restore point before I started and at least two more along the way, but I don't know EXACTLY when the problem arose, or even if it's just a coincidence and was there before I started.

I am wondering WHETHER to just restore to the beginning and see if it cures it, but I thought I'd post on a forum or two first in case someone recognises the likely cause. I know restore points are meant to be safe, but my last hdd died completely during one, and I've been more reluctant since. If there's another cause it makes more sense to keep the modifications and updates I've made since and cure it.

I had one curious file in the folder where this is happening, which I rotated as a JPEG lossless operation in irfanview (from being just in portrait with a rotate flag) and this thumbnail shows up in some browsers as stretched to fit a landscape format. It could be like it's got the rotate exif still set, but it doesn't rotate it, just makes it wide and low and thus stretched.

I tried removing that file in case it was somehow corrupting things, and then tried copying the rest of the pics to a new directory in case the directory was corrupted, but they still show the same. At the moment I haven't got a load of pictures on this machine to reproduce the problem elsewhere.

Win XP Home SP3 on Advent 4211I forgot to say that this affects some of the rotated thumbs in a random kind of way - on refreshing the page I'll get different ones missing or partially drawn, and only a handful of them out of hundreds in the dir. A little strip across the top of one will show up, 90% of another, one completely blank, etc.

I should also say that I've had this in two different browsers, although one of them I've uninstalled. The one they're still showing up like that in is Cubic Explorer. None of my others - WE, Powerdesk Pro 5 and some standalone freebies rotate thumbs anyway, and they're drawn fine when not rotated. In Cubic, the preview pane doesn't rotate the image, and even ones that are poorly drawn as thumbs show properly in preview.

If I should ask this somewhere else, please let me know. Thanks.Shameless bump! Hoping someone has some ideas about what to do, as I've updated several things and don't want to go back to a restore point and have to update them all over again.Try This...

It's for Vista but should work for XP too...Thanks very much, patio. Unfortunately that's not it, but probably useful for people like me to be reminded that you can type things into the run dialog instead of fishing for the link! That starts "Disk Cleanup" on XP, and I selected everything apart from compressing old files (life's too short and my hdd is ...eh-hem... massive). Possibly ccleaner or similar might fix it, but I haven't installed that yet on here.

It's something weird to do with the actual "painting" (I think you call it) of the thumbnails. I've discovered that in certain settings in UltraExplorer, particularly when the hovering pointer pops up full information on the file, the EXIF-rotated thumbs go crazy, flickering and being redrawn constantly as I move the mouse around. The landscape ones don't budge (and as I said above, there aren't any problems with how they are depicted at all, just some of the rotated ones don't fully get painted in a random selection kind of a way). If I open a window above the file browser and close it again, which causes a repainting of the thumbs, a different random selection goes wrong. I can also set UE to cache thumbs, and then it just keeps whatever got randomly drawn fully or partially, of course. I wonder if it's a video driver or something that's got corrupted. I guess updating some drivers might be a next step, yeah? Any thoughts from anyone about which, or other ideas, gratefully received. It doesn't seem to be a massive problem, nothing CRASHES and suchlike.

I notice that irfanview thumbs is absolutely fine. I've written to the UltraExplorer designer to see if he's got any ideas.

ETA: Aha, is there a clue there? - both UltraExplorer and Cubic Explorer do this, but irfanview thumbs is fine. It must be something to do with the methods they use for painting thumbs.The issue probably lies with the third party software itself...Quote from: patio on January 17, 2010, 07:05:50 AM

The issue probably lies with the third party software itself...